The United Kingdom and Human Rights - College of Social ...

2 The United Kingdom and Human Rights Thinking
course—and who in this Europhillic moment 1 can forget
it—human rights discourse arose in a Western European
context. Human rights thinking is the house that
Ioannis, Iacomo, John, Johann, Johannes and Jack built,
with the marketing being done by Jacques with his
Estates-General agent's board, declaring rights. 2
My own discourse begins by explaining how thinking
and the growth of legal institutions in Western Europe
and in the United Kingdom and her colonies interacted
to father the concept of and theories of human rights as
well as current conceptions of their content. Yet,
anomalously, in the place where human rights were first
conceived, so also was their philosophical basis first
destroyed. Despite this first philosophical demolition,
the British and early American contributions to the
theory and practice of human rights continued to
provoke new syntheses. Ultimately, with significant
participation by Anglophone statesmen, a universal
international legal ethic of human rights was developed.
Paradoxically, that international legal obligation, together
with similar regional European obligations, all of which
are accepted as binding by the United Kingdom, now
reinforce conceptions originating here, reminding the
originators of their own traditions.
In tackling the vast subject of human rights, which
touches on all relationships between men and the
societies of which they are part, I have tried to apply
approaches not only of lawyers, but also those of
historians of ideas and of political institutions, of moral
and of political philosophers, of economists, of social
administrators, of educationalists and of other social
scientists. Thus the reader may at times feel a little
burdened with theory and history. Nonetheless, all these
perspectives and the historical background are necessary
if the many complex issues are to be understood and
evaluated. Accordingly, after a theoretical and historical