The UK signed the European Convention on Human Rights, which covers both human rights and civil liberties, and it is part of our law. But how are they different?
Alma-Constance and Lucinda talk to Shami Chakrabarti CBE, PC who sits in the House of Lords and is a human rights activist. She tells us:
· how civil liberties and human rights work to protect us all
· how the rule of law relates to civil liberties and human rights
· Shami’s work to protect children's rights and why the voting age should be 16 years old
· why diversity and inclusion is important in the area of civil liberties and human rights
When Shami was 10 years old she cared a lot about injustice and liked talking to her parents about politics. She liked to read, debate and enjoyed playing musical instruments.
References and Resources
https://members.parliament.uk/member/4579/contact
Books:
Human Rights The Case for the Defence – release on 2/5/24
Keep your questions coming in. Please subscribe, rate, and share the podcast with your friends. See you soon in the next episode!
You can follow us @kidslawinfo on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram
The UK signed the European Convention on Human Rights, which covers both human rights and civil liberties, and it is part of our law. But how are they different?
Alma-Constance and Lucinda talk to Shami Chakrabarti CBE, PC who sits in the House of Lords and is a human rights activist. She tells us:
· how civil liberties and human rights work to protect us all
· how the rule of law relates to civil liberties and human rights
· Shami’s work to protect children's rights and why the voting age should be 16 years old
· why diversity and inclusion is important in the area of civil liberties and human rights
When Shami was 10 years old she cared a lot about injustice and liked talking to her parents about politics. She liked to read, debate and enjoyed playing musical instruments.
References and Resources
https://members.parliament.uk/member/4579/contact
Books:
Human Rights The Case for the Defence – release on 2/5/24
Keep your questions coming in. Please subscribe, rate, and share the podcast with your friends. See you soon in the next episode!
You can follow us @kidslawinfo on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram
Hello, I'm Alma Constance and.
Speaker 3:I'm Lucinda.
Speaker 2:And together in our Kids Law podcast, we're taking a look at how laws affect children as we grow up.
Speaker 3:So, alma Constance, what are we going to look at in this episode?
Speaker 2:Well, in previous episodes we have talked about human rights, and I would like to know if these are the same as civil liberties.
Speaker 3:They are both linked. The United Kingdom signed the European Convention on Human Rights, which covers both human rights and civil liberties, and that is now part of our law. Let's speak to the right honourable Baroness Chakrabati CB, who has had a prominent career working in civil liberties. She wrote a book on liberty and now sits in the House of Lords.
Speaker 2:Hello Shammi. Thank you so much for joining us on our Kids Law podcast today. We are very pleased to have you here. Could you please tell us more about how civil liberties and human rights work to protect us?
Speaker 1:I'd love to give my perspective on it, and it was really kind of you to mention my first book, which is now nearly 10 years old, called On Liberty, because I've just finished writing my third book, which is about human rights and covers things like the question that you're just posing about the relationship between civil liberties and human rights and that'll come out, hopefully, next spring. But essentially, human rights is the bigger group of all the rights that human beings need to survive and thrive in the world. Civil liberties are a subset of human rights, so human rights cover your social and economic rights and they cover your cultural rights, and civil rights, or civil liberties in particular, tend to be a phrase that's used to cover the more political rights, the rights that are essential to you being an active participant in your political community. But there is an overlap between all of these rights and you're quite right to refer to the European Convention on Human Rights.
Speaker 1:That tends to cover more the classic civil rights, which include the right to life, not to be tortured or degraded or enslaved, free speech, fair trials, equal treatment, non discrimination, social and economic rights, which are not so much civil liberties or civil rights, include rights to healthcare and education, and increasingly some people argue to a decent environment and so on. And your cultural rights are about access to science and culture and the rights of indigenous people not to be erased from modern life. So I would say these are not totally discrete or separate groups. There are huge overlaps. So the groups of rights civil rights, social and economic rights and cultural rights are not completely separate. But mostly we think about our civil liberties or civil rights as more to do with the individual trying to engage with other people in a political community, and not your basic shelter, healthcare, water and so on.
Speaker 2:Can you tell us what inspired you to become a human rights lawyer and how you worked in this?
Speaker 1:area. I don't know how old you are these days exactly, on the Constance, but I'm 54. But I certainly do remember being 12 or 13-ish and watching the TV news with my family when the hunt was on for a terrible, a terrible murderer. And I remember feeling very scared, watching this with my parents and saying something to my parents like you know, they should do XYZ to this terrible monster when they catch him. And my father replied to me you can't possibly support the death penalty. And of course, the truth was I didn't really know what I thought about the death penalty and I sort of said to him well, why not, why not for someone who's done such terrible, terrible things as this? And my father said to me you have to understand that no criminal justice system will ever, ever be perfect. And even if it's just one person in a million who's wrongly convicted, you have to imagine that it might be you. And how would you feel if you were this one person who'd been wrongly accused, convicted of heinous crimes, and you'd exhausted all of your appeals and nobody believed you. And that was a particular moment in my young life that stuck with me ever since. And I think, if I was gonna point to one moment that made me start thinking about people who are wrongly accused of terrible things, or even just other people in a minority when an angry group turns on them, is that got me thinking about things like not just the death penalty but miscarriages of justice, all the people who are wrongly suspected, accused, demonized in our societies.
Speaker 1:It was clear to me by the time I was a teenager that I wanted to study law and I saw that as a tool for whatever activism or campaigning I would do, and I also thought that even just being a lawyer and representing individual people is enough to do your bit in the world. So I did a law degree at the London School of Economics and for a while I thought I might want to do something else. I did consider film school for a while, because I had this idea that the power of cinema was amazing and I thought you could reach so many people that way. But in the end I did read for the bar and I was called to the bar and practiced at the bar for a little while not very long and then I got a job in the home office as a lawyer and I worked there for about nearly six years and that's when I went to work at Liberty.
Speaker 2:In our previous episode, we have heard about how important it is for the rule of law to be upheld by everyone, including those in power. How does the rule of law relate to civil liberties and human rights?
Speaker 1:Well, I would say that there's a relationship.
Speaker 1:These are distinct concepts, but there's definitely a relationship between them.
Speaker 1:Before you can even have a civilized society, let alone a democracy, you begin with the rule of law, and the rule of law is very, very basic principles like the idea that everybody is subject to the law, including those who govern.
Speaker 1:Everybody is equal before the law when they are accused of something, when they take their disputes to a court, but equally, everybody is bound by the law, and it includes, in the modern era, things like international law and that is, if you like, the bedrock.
Speaker 1:That's the foundation, the building block of any civilization, and it incorporates things like the human right to fair trials and access to justice. But once you've established that foundation to your society, then you build upon that and other rights and freedoms can be built upon that free speech and personal privacy and freedom of thought, conscience and religion, and the right not to be tortured or enslaved, and also your social and economic rights to education and healthcare and shelter and water and a decent environment, and to culture and to science. But without the rule of law, these other rights and freedoms will not be obeyed, there won't be access to justice and powerful people won't feel subject to the same rules as everybody else. So it's really about everybody being bound by the law and everybody having access to the law and it being real and protected as a foundation of a civilized society.
Speaker 2:Have you been involved in work to specifically protect children's rights, and how are the children involved in this process?
Speaker 1:I have been involved in a number of legal cases on behalf of children and young people whose rights were being ignored or violated, and this was particularly the case when I worked at Liberty, the National Council for Civil Liberties, where I worked first as a lawyer from 2001 and then as director from 2003 until 2016. We have to remember that children, according to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, are under 18, even though they increasingly get some rights as they hit their teens and, in particular, when they hit 16. But they're particularly vulnerable when they can't vote. They are economically dependent on their parents and other people, but not being able to vote means that, like refugees or prisoners or various other groups, they are politically vulnerable. Politicians don't court them because they don't have a vote at the ballot box and therefore it's very easy to ignore their rights and freedoms.
Speaker 1:I once acted for a 15-year-old girl who was studying for her GCSEs and this was during the Iraq War in around 2003, 2004. She was protesting against the Iraq War at lunchtime and her teacher said that she was breaking school rules and she got into an argument with her teacher and was expelled and it was just before her GCSEs. And being expelled with no appeal with no warning and this would have had a terrible effect on her. And we said that this was a disproportionate interference with her free speech and her right to protest. In particular, it wasn't that she shouldn't have some kind of penalty if she had indeed broken school rules, but just that the interference with her rights was disproportionate. And unfortunately we had to take this case to the high courts and we did negotiate what's called a consent order between the parties that she should be allowed back into school to at least take her revision classes and take her exams that summer.
Speaker 1:And, by the way, in the world there's a long history of young people, including children, protesting. There were many teenage suffragettes, there were many school children who protested against apartheid in South Africa, and so school children, when they protest, are particularly vulnerable to disproportionate interferences, and represented children who have been punished under school uniform rules for wearing religious symbols and had to get schools to change their policy to respect their freedom of expression and religion. And I've also represented children who have been subject to collective punishment when they've done nothing wrong. These are things like curfew orders that cover a whole local authority area, saying that anybody under 16 has to be indoors by whatever, it is nine o'clock at night.
Speaker 2:Why did you become so involved in politics and what roles have you had?
Speaker 1:Ultimately, sticking my neck out and getting involved in politics was an extension of the same instinct that took me into the law. For me, the law was always a vehicle, on the one hand, to defend vulnerable people and, on the other hand, to try and achieve some positive change, and so I see an overlap between law and politics and policy. Always, and before I was at Liberty, I worked as a policy lawyer in the Home Office, so I think in a way these things are related and my motivations come pretty much from the same place. And, by the way, I think that human rights affect not just our laws. They're not just human rights laws, they're also a system of values and ethics, and so they should motivate our politics too. In the party political sphere, I mean, you could say that human rights sometimes sit at the cusp between law and politics, and of course human rights get criticized for that. But there is a lot of politics in the law. In fact, it's legislators sitting in parliament that frame our laws in the first place. So it's naive to suggest that law and politics aren't intertwined.
Speaker 1:After being the director of Liberty for nearly 13 years, I went into the House of Lords very specifically to be shadow attorney general. So I see that as a very legal political role. The attorney general in our government is someone who advises the government on law and also a legal advisor to parliament and is also responsible for things like the prosecution system, the charitable system and really just trying to safeguard the rule of law within government. So it is a political role, but to safeguard the rule of law. So I am a political person. I've never been elected to parliament. I've only ever been in the House of Lords, I've never sought election and I don't flinch from the description of politician. But I think I'm much more a human rights lawyer, activist, campaigner than I am a professional politician, because I haven't ever been elected, nor have I sought election.
Speaker 2:Could you also tell us what you do in the House of Lords and do you think the voices of children are considered in bad debates?
Speaker 1:That's a great question. So in the House of Lords, which is the second chamber of our parliament, and most parliaments around the world do have a secondary revising chamber, but of course in Britain it's very curious because it's unelected, which is a whole debate in itself. But I think our principal role is really in scrutinising legislation. Governments produce a lot of legislation, a lot of it, and a lot of that legislation impacts rights and freedoms and the House of Commons rushes through a lot of that legislation without very careful scrutiny. And of course, governments often have big majorities in the House of Commons, so it's very difficult to properly hold the government to account and properly to scrutinise and amend and improve legislation. So I think that I would argue the principal role of the House of Lords, apart from asking questions and having debates about important matters, our most important role is in taking longer time to scrutinise and carefully consider legislation before it passes, and that's something that I try and engage with and spend quite a lot of time on. As for whether children are considered at times, yes, when particular clauses come up that may have a particular impact, I'm not convinced that they are considered enough. In my view. I think there should be much more of a children's voice in all our policy forums in this country, including in Parliament.
Speaker 1:I personally support votes at 16, partly for that reason and partly just because I think that so many of the very, very big issues and grave threats to the world now are going to really come to a head some years in the future.
Speaker 1:In particular, of course, I mean climate emergency, and I'm afraid that there are significant numbers of older people who are happy to put their head in the sand about things like climate emergency frankly, because they won't be around when it gets really bad and there are also other issues to do with where money should be put, who should be prioritised in terms of things like mental health care or other services, and I often see that children do not get their fair share, and I think that would improve if we had votes at the age of 16. You know, children are held criminally responsible well before they are 16. So they're criminally responsible if they get a job at 16, they're paying tax, they're paying VAT when they spend their money. There's so many ways in which they're held accountable like ordinary citizens, and I think they ought to be empowered as well, and I don't see any reason why a 16 year old isn't competent to make a decision about how to vote.
Speaker 2:Has your political role changed your views about the balance of state involvement and freedom of each?
Speaker 1:person. Has it changed my view? Goodness me, I think my life has. It's difficult, in a way, to separate just living longer and seeing more and reading more from a particular role, but I would certainly say during my life I have seen too much state involvement in interfering with things like people's civil liberties and too little state support for people's social and economic rights like their healthcare and their education and their shelter and their safety standards, as in Grenfell, etc. Etc. So on the one hand we see a very intrusive state interfering with people's freedoms, but we also see often a very negligent state when it comes to performing its role to create basic infrastructure and services to support people.
Speaker 2:I know you have spoken about the importance of diversity and inclusion. Why is this issue particularly important in the area of civil liberties and human rights?
Speaker 1:Well, the first thing I would say is that I think would be extraordinary for Britain to pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights and very dangerous. One of the reasons why this is that, though people love their own liberties, what they really have a problem with is not their own rights or the rights of their family members or people they agree with or people like them. It's other people's rights. It's other people who also have a problem with, and that is why equal treatment is the key to the human rights kingdom, and I always say equal treatment is the most important human right of all. Why? Because if we really achieved equal treatment in the application of rights and freedoms, there would be no torture, there would be no suppression of free speech and so on and so forth. Because it's about treating other people as you want to be treated, and that is the key to the human rights kingdom, and this is also to be found as a principle of all great human civilisations in history and the great world religions and so on. Walk around in someone else's shoes, treat other people as you'd like to be treated, etc. Etc. Etc. And that is the thing that some people find really, really hard. My speech is free, yours is a little bit more expensive.
Speaker 1:The hypocrisy is the opposite of equal treatment, and I think it is easier to achieve equal treatment when you have, in the judiciary and elsewhere in important institutions, you have a range of experience, so it's easier to empathise. Now that doesn't mean that a male judge can't give justice to a woman and so on, or a person of a particular race can't do justice to another. It just helps the general ecosystem of human rights if we broaden the pool of people in these important positions, Because then we're sharing our experience, we're broadening empathy and making it easier to achieve equal treatment in practice. I also think it achieves better public confidence in institutions, whether the judiciary or government or parliament or all the banking system, whatever it happens to be, if the public can see people like them. It's not the whole answer, However. I still think that institutions should try as much as possible to reflect the people they serve.
Speaker 2:I have a question. I ask all of our guests what were you like at 10? And what did you imagine you had gone to be as an adult?
Speaker 1:What was I like at 10? Probably quite annoying, I think, precocious, fairly argumentative, feisty. I cared a lot about injustice. I cared a lot about politics. I guess I thought I would do something in that area. I liked to read, I liked to talk about politics. I liked to debate. I played some musical instruments not very well. I was very lucky when I was at school in state schools. We had a wonderful musical education In my state school I think a lot was shared with us that isn't so available to young people today and that's a very much regret. We were constantly taken to. I was in the suburbs of London. We were taken to the theatre, we were taken to the national theatre and to you know, subsidised or free of charge. We went on lots of school trips. Lots of arts and culture and extracurricular activities were open to us.
Speaker 2:Thank you so so much, sammy, for telling us about your work and you, as about civil liberties and human rights. Do you have any final advice for children who want to understand more about the issues you've discussed?
Speaker 1:Well, I certainly hope that some of you will look out for my book Next Spring and I hope that you'll read it Not too long a couple of hundred pages. I would ask people not to despair. Today, young people are very understandably concerned about climate catastrophe and many other bad things happening in the world. But I would say don't despair, read, engage, get involved in campaigns, enjoy your learning as much as you can. Don't be too pressurised and anxious about exams, which can always be taken again if they go wrong. The real thing is to love the learning and the reading and the engagement and find friends and like-minded people.
Speaker 1:And don't despair and don't feel lonely and don't think that engagement and socialisation is just about the internet. The internet is incredibly exciting and there's so much to be found there, but I think there's something special about real human engagement as well, and we on the left of politics use the word solidarity. Other people use other words. Muslims are Christians, our fellowship, but these are all words for interconnection, community, not being alone, because, of course, human rights belong to individual human beings, but we are social creatures and that's why we have to have free speech and freedom of association and freedom of conscience, because we do want to engage with other people in families and communities. So don't be lonely and don't despair. Get involved and have some fun as well. Thank you so much. Thanks a lot, folks, thank you Bye-bye, bye.
Speaker 3:Well, elmer, what do you think about what Shammy told us?
Speaker 2:Well, Shammy told us that human rights are the rights that human beings need to survive and thrive in the world. Civil liberties are a group of rights included in human rights and relate to the more political side, but both human rights and civil liberties overlap and belong to everyone. She added that no criminal justice system is perfect and that it is very important to keep in mind that everybody is bound by law and that all should be treated with fairness and equality. She was inspired to become a human rights lawyer by conversations with her father and has worked to defend the rights of children.
Speaker 3:Yes, shammy also said politics and law are linked, as politicians are the policy and lawmakers. She also echoed what other people have told us about the importance of the rule of law and how this is a basic principle and essential for the civil liberties and human rights that protect us. She reminded us of the importance of the diversity of views when we make laws, and this helps ensure that we treat people equally.
Speaker 2:Shammy said she thinks that children should be given the vote, as so many issues concern children, that they should have a greater voice in lawmaking and that politicians would take more notice of their views if they had the vote.
Speaker 3:In our podcast, we've been exploring how laws work and affect young people. All of these things can help children understand their rights and responsibilities so they can make informed decisions, not only about their lives, but also about voting for MPs who make the laws and understanding how the legal justice system works. It's also important that children know that it should be kept safe and that adults must care for them. Remember, if you have any worries, talk to an adult you trust and tell them how you feel. This includes your teachers at school, who are there to look after you too, so tell them that you need to talk to them.
Speaker 2:Keep your questions coming in. Please subscribe, rate and share the podcast with your friends. See you soon in the next episode. Bye.