WHILE WE DEBATED ENTITLEMENTS, Great Britain this week got its first written Bill of Rights. As the latest step towards unified global government, it is a harbinger we should watch carefully.
England is home of Magna Carta, the great charter that in year 1215 limited the power of the king, especially relative to the nobles. But this land called the mother of parliaments has never had a written constitution. The laws and rights of Englishmen and Englishwomen emerged from custom, tradition, the agreements of kings and legislators, and the rulings of courts. Until this week, the British have enjoyed what New York Times reporter Sarah Lyall describes as “negative rights - that is, they have been allowed to do anything they want, unless there is a law specifically forbidding it.”
The winners of America’s revolution knew how slippery and capricious English governance and rights could be in practice. These former colonists insisted on a written Constitution. This Constitution was intended not to restrict the people but to control and limit those politicians and others eager to expand government (and through it their own) power, to in Thomas Jefferson’s phrase, “bind them down with the chains of the Constitution.” The Constitution (Article I, Section 8) enumerates limited powers as all that the government is supposed to possess, among which are not, e.g., the power to control education in states and localities.
Some framers like Alexander Hamilton opposed inclusion of a Bill of Rights, however, arguing that any positive right omitted would be lost to the people. But Jefferson, from Paris, insisted on a Bill of Rights. His cat’s paw at the Constitutional Convention, James Madison, devised the Ninth and Tenth Amendments in our Bill of Rights to insure that any unnamed rights were retained by the states and the people.
The ideal for society ever since Hammurabi of Babylon, Solon of Greece, and Justinian of Byzantium was that people should live under a government “of laws, not men.” Our rules and justice should come not from the momentary whim of a ruler, but from known, preferably written, laws that apply to and are obeyed by all.
But although the words of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments remain inscribed in our Constitution, politicians and their appointed judges slipped off these chains long ago by circumventing and refusing to enforce their provisions.. Thus unshackled, monster government has been fattening on the fruits of our labor and devouring our freedoms ever since.
And America has been sliding backwards from civilization into a society not of laws but of the whims of men and women in black robes. In his ideological crystal ball, e.g., former Supreme Court Associate Justice William Brennan divined from what he called the “emanations of the penumbras” of the Constitution an unwritten right to privacy that justified legalizing abortion in Roe v. Wade. But Justice Brennan somehow was unable to recognize the plainly spelled out “right of the People to keep and bear Arms” of the Second Amendment.
This is why all sides agree that by far the most important issue at stake in the November election is who will name to lifetime appointments the next two or three Supreme Court justices and perhaps hundreds of lesser federal judges, the unelected people who now manipulate and control our laws.
The residue of liberty not yet destroyed permits journalists to write articles such as this one with little fear of the gestapo kicking in our door to drag us off to prison. But virtually every reporter who dared investigate the current regime has been a target of audits by the federal Internal Revenue Service, which can remove our doors and homes through the politicized power to tax, called by former Chief Justice John Marshall “the power to destroy.” What few rights we have left endure thanks to our written Bill of Rights.
Shortly after Laborite socialist Tony Blair was elected Prime Minister (with campaign help from Bill Clinton and Al Gore), he pushed into law the Human Rights Act. After years of preparation and an allocation of more than $85 million to accommodate its impact, this measure came into force Monday. It enshrines as written law in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland the amended 50-year-old Council of Europe’s Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Semi-autonomous Scotland had already adopted this European measure earlier this year.
This “Bill of Rights,” adopted by the United Kingdom 209 years after our own, seems in some ways familiar. It should, having been drafted largely by English and American specialists along the lines of our legal precepts following World War II. A closer look at this Europe-unifying document, however, should give most Americans reasons for concern, if this is what a future global Bill of Rights might look like.
Among its protected rights and freedoms, the Convention affirms a “right to life” for everyone. This has been interpreted to ban the death penalty throughout Europe, but not to prohibit abortion.
America’s Declaration of Independence affirms the “unalienable” right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But days ago, 15 members of Congress voted against the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act that would prohibit the killing of a baby that somehow survives an abortion procedure. Perhaps an abortion doctor’s hand slips while holding the nine-tenths-born baby’s head inside the mother as he reaches with his other hand for forceps to pierce the infant’s skull, so its brains can be vacuumed out. And because of this slip, the baby slides completely outside the mother. This law would declare the baby born and in full possession of human rights. The 15 Congressmen who voted to let these already-born babies be killed anyway (call it “post-natal abortion”) by the mother or abortionist are: Julia Carson (D-IN), John Dingell (D-Mich.), Chaka Fattah (D-Penn.), Ben Gilman (R-NY), Charles Gonzales (D-TX), Alcee Hastings (D-Fla), Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-Ill., son of the minister), Nancy Johnson (R-Ct), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), Nita Lowey (D-NY), Carolyn Maloney (D-NY, who won election in an anti-gun, anti-violence campaign after a relative was killed by the New York train gunman), Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga), Nydia Velazquez (D-NY), Maxine Waters (D-Calif., whose slogan-threat was “No justice, No peace”), and Mel Watt (D-NC).
The European Convention prohibits torture, slavery, and forced labor. But it precludes from such protection military conscription, confiscatory taxation, or any other “work or service which forms part of normal civic obligations.” Does this refer to jury duty or to things far more onerous?
It provides a “right to liberty or security,” but allows “lawful detention” of minors for “educational supervision” and “of persons for the prevention of the spreading of infectious diseases, of persons of unsound mind, alcoholics or drug addicts or vagrants.” The therapeutic Soviets routinely imprisoned dissidents as “persons of unsound mind.”
It provides a “right to a fair trial,” but also for exclusion of the press from such trials. It affirms that defendants “shall be presumed innocent until proved guilty,” a major change for Napoleonic legal traditions in France.
The European Convention in Article 8 provides the “Right to respect for private and family life.” Is this the kind of privacy right Justice Brennan found? But as with many of these “rights,” this document offers a host of exceptions for “national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals….” and more. So individual rights can be abrogated for “the economic well-being of the country” or the protection of “morals?” These are loopholes so vague and huge that an ambitious politician or lawyer could drive an 18-wheeler through them. And this Bill of Rights is jam-packed with such weasel-word provisions.
With the same exceptions, it provides rights of freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and freedom of expression. So why has Germany persecuted the Church of Scientology? Do not some European nations still use taxes to subsidize official state churches, like the Church of England? And freedom of expression expressly does not prohibit governments from “the licensing of broadcasting, television, or cinema enterprises.” I can understand the practical aspect of keeping two nearby radio stations from broadcasting on the same frequency, but why should free speech governments be able to license “cinema enterprises” that show movies privately behind closed doors only to those who choose to pay to attend? Free expression may also be stifled by law “for the protection of the reputation…of others.” Hey, President John Adams imposed this via the “Alien and Sedition Acts” and jailed three congressmen and more than two dozen journalists for the “crime” of saying or writing unpleasant things about the President and members of his cabinet. The “aliens” he targeted were French expatriates who supported Adams’ rival Jefferson. But the European Convention today allows restrictions on “alien” participation in a nation’s politics. As to reputation, American law today holds that you cannot libel someone if you tell the truth, however ugly, about him, and that politicians and other public figures must prove knowing falsehood and malice to win a libel suit; under British law, by contrast, the greater the truth the greater the libel, and this largely holds sway concerning public figures as well as private ones.
The European Convention guarantees freedom of assembly and association, including the explicit right to join trade unions. It affirms a “right to marry” but only as permitted by “the national laws governing the exercise of this right” that may or may not allow gay marriage.
Article 14 provides a “Prohibition of discrimination” that includes “discrimination on any ground such as sex, race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin” or “association with a national minority.” It does not mention sexual preference. But - and this is fascinating - it prohibits discrimination because of “property, birth or other status.” As I have called for here and elsewhere, this in theory could open the door to hate crime protection based on class, to punishing those who speak or act with hatred towards the rich as so many populist and liberal politicians and labor union fatcats do.
This Convention also has provisions allowing nations to abrogate human rights “In time of war or other public emergency threatening the life of the nation,” whatever that might mean. The Convention’s Article 53 provides that it cannot limit “the human rights and fundamental freedoms” ensured by the laws of any signatory member.
And British citizens had already been taking cases to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, whose rulings forced Britain to prohibit corporal punishment of schoolchildren, limit telephone wiretaps, and allow gays to serve in its military. The judges of this court are not given the immunity of lifetime appointment but are elected by the European Parliamentary Assembly to six-year terms, and might therefore be subject to political considerations.
Students of America’s Bill of Rights will notice some odd omissions from the European Convention. There is here no right to keep and bear arms, nor any safeguard against the government taking of private property. What rights Europeans receive here seem conditional on the whim of the governments involved.
Many British critics of their new “Bill of Rights” are concerned that it opens the door to widespread lawsuits by individuals and special interest groups. The outcome of many civil and criminal cases may hang on the whim of judges and on the legal precedents of case law set not just by English courts but also by courts throughout Europe.
No British court can declare an Act of Parliament unconstitutional, there being no written constitution to cite nor precedent for such unelected judicial power. (In the United States, the Supreme Court arrogated such power to itself almost 200 years ago, and the power of these judges to erase Acts of Congress is now firmly established.) But under this Convention, the judges elected from many nations in Strasbourg, France, can effectively nullify British laws and regulations and erode British national sovereignty.
In an old joke, a man awakens and says: “I dreamed I was in heaven, where the Italians wrote the poetry, the Swiss ran the trains, the French did the cooking, and the English controlled the government. But then suddenly my dream changed, and I plunged down, down into hell. And in hell the Swiss wrote the poetry, the French ran the trains, the English did the cooking, and the Italians controlled the government!”
The English are now holding their breath, waiting to see whether Italian and other continental jurists are going to run their government. Things may go better than expected. In Scotland, only a tiny percentage of those appealing to the Strasbourg court have won their cases, and few of those have been of the “field day for crackpots” variety some feared. Those of us who have ridden the high speed TGV know that the French can do a satisfactory job running trains. After a few years of precedents, the new British-written Bill of Rights may prove itself an improvement, preventing Parliament from removing rights as easily as it recently expropriated virtually all firearms from law-abiding citizens.
Or this biggest change in British jurisprudence in almost 800 years could precipitate a torrent of new rights and social changes that might leave British tradition, values, cultural identity, and social cohesion in tatters. Even bad news could have a silver lining if it helped turn Prime Minister Blair’s Labor Party out of office.
But pay attention. Today no-longer-Great Britain is aligning its centuries-old tradition of rights with the historically-recent “positive rights” Convention of welfare-statist Europe. As the “New World Order” global government expands its grasp, you and I will likely live to see a treaty proposed to “harmonize” the European Convention with our own Bill of Rights. Such harmony would require restriction or removal of every human right framed by Jefferson and Madison. If America agrees, soon little will be left of our rights.