This article is a preview from the Winter 2014 edition of New Humanist. You can find out more and subscribe here.
Shami Chakrabarti is director of the advocacy group Liberty. Her new book On Liberty is published by Allen Lane.
You’ve been at Liberty for nearly 12 years. What have been your biggest achievements?
“Charge or Release” [the campaign against a proposition to detain terror suspects for up to 42 days without charge] was important. We stopped a really bad law from hitting the statute book. Suspects would have been locked up for six weeks, or 1,000 hours, without knowing why.
What about the biggest disappointments?
When politicians say one thing in opposition and another thing in government, it is disappointing. Recently, as a result of events in Iraq, some have called for powers to seize people’s passports at the border and to leave people stranded if they’ve been foolish enough to go on some ridiculous Boy’s Own adventure. It’s just crazy. Do they not learn from past mistakes?
You talk about the post-9/11 erosion of civil liberties becoming the rule. Can that be changed?
We have got to defend the Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights. It’s not a computer programme that gives you magic answers, but it is at least a bedrock of legal principles and ethical values. If you keep that, then even when the politicians get it wrong, we still have the courts as our final backstop protection.
What will happen if we lose the Human Rights Act?
We need these values to live, not just in the courtroom but in the parliament chamber and the newsroom and the living room. But you still do need the courtroom. If we lose the Act, then I don’t know how we defend those values from day to day.
Has the public accepted the argument that to be protected, we have to give away freedoms?
They did in the beginning. They started changing their minds when they saw the law of unintended consequences [at work]. The danger is that you don’t know what you had till it’s gone.
Do people care about human rights?
People do care about their own. It’s other people’s that are a bit more challenging. We’ve got to understand how interconnected our lives are and how shrinking the world is. You can’t segment in that way. If you don’t stick up for other people’s children, who is going to stick up for yours?
Is it difficult conveying that message about the universality of human rights?
The point is that anybody can be suspect and demonised and unpopular, and it could be you. This isn’t just about high principles. There is a practical self-interest point as well. It’s impossible, practically, logically, politically, to protect your own human rights while you allow the human rights of other people to be trampled on. That’s true across the globe.
Is there a tendency in the UK for people to be complacent?
We’re so lucky to live in the first world, in an old, unbroken democracy, where people like me don’t get arrested and tortured for speaking up. That’s great, but the danger of that good fortune is complacency. We’ve had those rights for a long time but they were still paid for in blood by the people who came before us.
What’s the line between religious freedom and practices that limit freedom?
The line is when you’re hurting other people. If somebody wants to be racist or homophobic, I will defend their freedom of conscience and freedom of speech, even when it’s hateful and unpalatable. However, if they are offering goods and services to members of the public and charging for it, then they are not allowed to discriminate because that is hurting other people. You can decide who is allowed to be in your church or your family or friendship circle. That is a matter for you, but not goods and services in the public square.
Is there anxiety about offending religious sensibilities?
It’s not any one religion; everybody is as bad as each other. There are people who don’t like Jerry Springer: the Opera because it’s anti-Christian, Sikhs who shut down the play Bezhti, Muslims angry about the Danish cartoons; “don’t mock my religion, don’t criticise it, don’t be disrespectful, don’t cause me offence.” You don’t have a right not to be irritated or offended. And be careful what you wish for – you say, “ban that play”, and the response could be, “I want to ban your religious clothing.” It’s the same thing.
What do you think when politicians occasionally suggest a ban on the face veil?
It’s shockingly illiberal. People who think of themselves as liberal and progressive and want to ban clothing should take a long hard look at themselves. My feminist heart does not leap with joy when I see a woman covered from head to toe, but nor does it leap with joy when I see a woman with her tits out on page 3 of the Sun. I’m not in favour of banning either. Worst of all, you ban some of that clothing and imprison those women in their own homes. Some people pretend it’s about empowering women. To me, it’s just racism.
JS Mill’s On Liberty is vague on the limits of liberty. Where do you think those limits are?
Unlike Mill, I’ve got the benefit of the post-World War Two human rights settlement, which is about protection as well as freedom; equality as well as liberty. That legal framework is as much about the limits as the liberties. There are no magic answers but these are guiding principles.
Are you optimistic for Britain?
I have to be an optimist because otherwise, why would you do my job? There’s a famous quote from Martin Luther King: “the arc of history is a long one but ultimately it bends towards justice.”
When I was young, I thought I’d never live to see relative peace in Northern Ireland, the end of apartheid in South Africa, the fall of the Berlin wall. I’ve lived to see all of those things. If people reflect on the past, and think about the future, we could do well. Perhaps my son’s generation will do better than mine.
