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A strange thought process is alive and well in Nulabour, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith is just the latest to conflate basic negative human rights with a governments duty to protect its citizen or subjects in our case, the concept of universal human rights and the later added concept of state donated social rights.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has stated that it is “A Fundamental Right not to be a victim of terrorism”

I wonder is it truly the case that we have fundamental right not to be a victim, we can dismiss the terrorism part because in reality it matters little to nothing to the victim if the attacker is defined as terrorist or bank robber.

But can we really claim that there is a basic human right not to be a victim?

When I hear a politician proclaiming the cause of human rights I feel it is time to check my wallet and hide behind the nearest tree, the claim of basic human rights has become the calling card for all sorts of disparate groups making all sorts of derisive claims ;

Abortion must become a basic part of the human rights, Access to Quality Higher Education in Science and Technology is a. basic human right. Access to safe and secure housing is one of the most basic human rights According to the UN, basic human rights are violated when countries cut off Internet access.

And when you hear the words from the mouth of NuLabour politicians they usually mean we are going to infringe on your basic rights (as is the case with Smith). The reason for this is the modern politician is more inclined to propose the concept of universal human rights, than they are to recognise human rights which are firmly grounded within the nation state.

Not that I would oppose the ideals of universal human rights as proposed by Islamic scholars in the 8th century (all human beings must have the right to life, property, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, family and honor) A basic right applies to all humans whatever their nationality creed or colour, all have the right to life the right to support themselves and the right to defend themselves the right to free speech. I believe we could all or should all sign up fully to that concept. I believe we can recognise universal human rights because they are basically the same as our own human rights which have developed over the years.

However that is not to easily dismiss nationally based human rights, especially our human rights because those are the rights that protect us from our own government.

In this instance our human rights were to protect people as individuals from abuses by the state. They were to limit the risk that legitimately elected, i.e. formally democratic, governments might commit crimes and cruelties in the name of majority rule.

This one of the reasons why our politicians would wish to transplant these limitations on their powers with the more political elite friendly version that developed on the continent.

This version of perceived rights as a sort of grant given by the state as a form of fulfilling its obligations to the society. Among these obligations was also the duty of the rulers to protect the citizens and to take care of them in times of need or deprivation.

Rights understood in that way, were not to protect individuals from the government but to be realized through the government of an active rather than passive state. This vision of rights was embodied in the French revolutionary constitution of 1790 as well as the second Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1793 and in the social legislation that spread throughout Europe in the in the late nineteenth century, and in its latest manifestation in the EU Charta of Fundamental Rights.

But when the term universal human rights is extended to include social rights that in reality mean someone has to pay for some others rights, then it cannot so apply to everyone, hence social rights gifted by government must be firmly rooted in the nation state an applicable to only those who pay for them.

In Britain for instance we have the right to free medical care at the point of use, but at the point of use, implies that the medical care offered by our National Health service is not in fact free, in fact it obviously is not a free service, we pay for it from our tax.

So we are all paying for our national health service, if you omit the last part, the paying part, and open our NHS to anyone based on the concept of universal rights it is a nonsense. Just because we do not pay for the service at the point of use, it is not an open door policy that the rest of the world’s population may use the same service. To argue otherwise is to argue that we owe the world free medical care. It might be a basic human right to own property but is it a basic human right to be gifted property in the form of free housing, within the nation state we have decided that no one should be without adequate housing, can that really be extended to anyone in the world who happens to come here legally or illegally.

The concept of social rights, which has served as the basic underpinning of the welfare state cannot be extended to universal human rights because we pay for those social rights. So although we can openly accept the concept of basic universal rights those rights cannot include social rights.

But anyway I have digressed, we do have the right of self defence, or we used to have the right of self defence but as argued by Max Weber that a central feature of the modern experience was the successful expropriation by the state of the “means of violence” from individuals.

In the modern world, in contrast to the medieval period in Europe and much historical experience elsewhere, only states could “legitimately” use violence; all other would-be wielders of violence must be licensed by states to do so. Those not so licensed were thus deprived of the freedom to employ violence against others. This of course is now used to imply that we do nor even have the right to use violence to protect ourselves, we have all heard of instances where the victim of a violent attack has responded by meeting violence with violence and had ended up in court as a consequence.

It is a very large step from the point of self defence to the point of having a basic human right not to be a victim, it rather smacks to me of the state usurping the right to self defence and then failing its duties to protect and using that failure to infringe further on our basic rights i.e. suspected terrorists must have less protection from the state than the rest of us, but the law will apply to all of us, because who know who will turn out to be suspected of terrorism the definitions of which are manifold and seemingly arbitrary, in fact one EU commissioner has stated it is a terrorism to protest if the that protest becomes violent.

The other point about the about the EU Charta of Fundamental Rights is that far from being as advertised a universal set of human rights it is human rights in the national sense because it sets out the rights for EU citizens against the EU intuitions and members states. It retains the power for the EU to overturn any of the Rights included in the interest of the Union. And worse the rights it offers are self contradictory that will only become clear if challenged in the ECJ, for instance:

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.

Everyone has the right to freedom of expression

Any discrimination based on any ground such as sex, race, colour, ethnic or social origin, genetic features, language, religion or belief, political or any other opinion, membership of a national minority, property, birth, disability, age or sexual orientation shall be prohibited.

The first two rights above do not slot neatly into the third, if one has the freedom of thought conscience and religion then a Christian Bishop would not be forced to employ a homosexual youth worker, or fined for not doing so one of the rights which are said to be fundamental must give way to another in which case how can the right be fundamental.