Human rights

Mixed emotions stirred here in Pakistan when Malala Yousafzai came within kissing distance of the Nobel Prize. The reaction was reminiscent of how we felt when Sharmeen Chinoy's Saving Face was up for an Oscar: great to be noticed by the world, but how tragic that the path to such recognition was paved with acid burnt faces. The deplorable act of attacking Malala increased the aversion felt for the Taliban among ordinary Pakistanis. But terrorists do not feed on public support; their demented ideology is sustenance enough. Pakistanis wept when Malala was battling for her life, and heaved a sigh of relief when she survived. We are proud that she has thrived. As for her moving to England, it affirms our view that the West has an equal penchant for inflicting and preventing pain.

Barely a week goes by when a female Lib Dem minister doesn’t pledge some new coalition initiative on ‘female body confidence’. The junior equalities minister Jo Swinson was at it again when she congratulated Debenhams for becoming the first high-street retailer to introduce size 16 mannequins. Ms Swinson said: ‘The images we see in the world of fashion are all pretty much the same. It’s as if there’s only one way of being beautiful. Yet nine in ten people say they would like to see a broader range of body shapes shown in advertising and the media.’ For broader range of body shapes, read fat, by the way. For nine in ten people, read nine in ten fat people.

Walking a lap of the North Pacific island of Nauru would take you three and a half hours. One kilometre inland, you would glimpse the republic’s phosphate mines. Living hundreds of kilometres from anywhere must sometimes feel like incarceration for the 10,000 or so Nauruans. What makes the republic seem even more prison-like is the way it is used by Australia as a detention and processing facility holding over 800 mostly Iranian asylum seekers. As fellow Commonwealth members, we should be concerned about this dot in the Pacific, and the way that Australia is off-shoring facilities there. Nauru is used by Australia to distance itself from the human face of its asylum problem.

First World, Third World, East, West, North and South; every few years economists come up with yet another supposedly more acceptable way of slicing humanity into manageable chunks. Mostly these great divides are riven by wealth; sometimes (RIP Second World) by ideology. But I think it’s time to name a new divide, a more fundamental, more puzzling one — a split between worlds that will define the 21st century much as the Iron Curtain defined the 20th. I am talking about the morality gap. It is now clear, though not much talked about, that humanity, all 7.1 billion of us, tends to fall into one of two distinct camps. On the one side are those who buy into the whole post-Enlightenment human rights revolution.

In his five years as Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer  has shown a striking appetite for (self-) publicity and given the job a higher profile than ever. He’s just informed the world, from Andrew Marr’s sofa, that he’s opposed to plans by the Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling, to tear up the egregious Human Rights Act which is playing havoc with the English justice system. I can see why he's alarmed: the confusion caused by superimposing European law on English law gives huge power to people, like him, who adjudicate. It has encouraged, in England, the emergence of American-style judicial activism.

There is a term which ought to be in better use – ‘human rights inflation'. This is the means by which the currency of ‘human rights’ – which used to mean things like ‘the right to life’ – becomes, thanks to the addition of endless spurious additional demands, severely undermined. The latest example of this trend has come to light this morning thanks to a Brazilian far-leftist who claims to be working as a rapporteur for the United Nations. As listeners to the Today programme will know (about 2 hours 37 minutes in here) according to Raquel Rolnik the latest inalienable human right is apparently the ‘right to a spare bedroom.

Last week’s Supreme Court ruling in the Snatch Land Rover / Challenger II cases, which allowed the families of four soldiers who lost their lives while serving in Iraq to sue for damages, has provoked some strong opinions. Some say that the MoD is in all ways different from other employers and that it should not therefore be held accountable in the courts. Of course soldiering is not ‘just another job’, but surely it does not follow that we should tolerate the deaths of young British citizens if those deaths are caused by the Government’s failure to provide adequate training or equipment. Soldiers should be no less entitled than the rest of us to protection against negligence and human rights abuses.

The British Army may never go to war again. Not because it is under-resourced and over-stretched but because, as of today, it may no longer be able to afford casualties. That, at any rate, is one thought prompted by the Supreme Court's extraordinary - to my mind - ruling that dead soldiers' families can sue the ministry of Defence for damages. According to the Supreme Court justices, the MoD may have been negligent in its "duty of care" and, consequently, the families may sue the government for failing, apparently, to safeguard the human rights of soldiers killed in Iraq (and, presumably, elsewhere). The court dismissed the MoD's suggestion there might sensibly be "battlefield immunity". I cannot for the life of me understand why. (The whole judgement can be read here.

How did a blind Chinese dissident scale the walls of his house while under house arrest, evade government surveillance, travel hundreds of miles to Beijing, seek asylum in the American embassy and in the process shine attention on a horror the world has grown used to? The questions for Chen Guangcheng are legion. Last week I met up with him in London. Chen, who is 41, has been blind since childhood and wears smart dark glasses. At our meeting place in central London — the headquarters of a Christian organisation which has helped arrange his visit — he sits upright, suited and tied, occasionally repositioning himself by feeling the corners of the table. He does not share the world’s fascination with his personal story.