& ALBIE SACHS ON HUMOUR

Also, something I came across yesterday, Justice Albie Sachs writing about the importance of humour in a free society, from a Judgement of the Constitutional Court of South Africa in a case concerning trademark infringement (a satirical bunch of activists had parodied the Carling Black Label brand on some t-shirts they had produced. The brand sued.):

"A society that takes itself too seriously risks bottling up its tensions and treating every example of irreverence as a threat to its existence. Humour is one of the great solvents of democracy. It permits the ambiguities and contradictions of public life to be articulated in non-violent forms. It promotes diversity. It enables a multitude of discontents to be expressed in a myriad of spontaneous ways. It is an elixir of constitutional health."

The full Judgements of the Court are here, with the relevant passage being at paragraph 109. (page 64).

Geoffrey Robertson on the Human Rights Act

I have been listening to a speech given by Geoffrey Robertson QC to an Australian audience on the history of Human Rights. There's a great bit towards the end where he comes to defending the UK's Human Rights Act. It's exactly the type of argument that should be being made by supporters of the HRA:

"The latest reports in the last few weeks assessing ten years of the charter show that the greatest beneficiaries are ... ordinary people, law abiding citizens treated unfairly by public servants, by bloody minded bureaucrats, in ways that are never noticed by the press, never mentioned in Parliament. Charter rights - it was the great breakthrough of the Universal Declaration - are based on human dignity. The right not to be ill treated; the right to privacy for yourself, and home, and family and children. And it's been in hospitals, in the old peoples' homes and schools that a whole host of demeaning, humiliating practices have been stopped. They havn't even had to come to court in most cases because doctors, nurses, community groups, aware of what the Human Rights Act is saying, aware of the need for greater respect for human dignity, are bringing them to the attention of public servants who are realising the errors of their ways.

Let me just give you a few of the examples of how the Human Rights Act, how the Charter, has helped. A married couple, married for 60 years - Local council, typical bureaucratic... puts them in separate care homes. Well, mention the Human Rights Act and the council changed its policy. Children of a woman in hospital found that she was, because of short staffing, had to eat her breakfast while sitting on the toilet. They complained under the Human Rights Act and this practice was changed. Mental patients asking to be discharged routinely required to wait six months. No reason, just a bureaucratic rule. The Human Rights Act ended it. There were special handling regulations for people using wheelchairs were less restrictive and had to be re-written to comply with the act.

So what it has done is require the state, public servants whether they're local authorities or local councils or government departments, to ask of every practice that is inflicted upon the old, the disabled, the mentally ill, the young. Does what I do effect people to the minimum in terms of infringing their human rights when human rights means people's basic entitlement to dignity?"

A video of the whole speech, and that segment, can be found here. An mp3 is available on iTunes.