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

Significance of the United Kingdom's Contribution 45
St. Tr. 1 vindicated personal liberty and condemned slavery
generally. Mansfield upheld the legal validity of slavery contracts,
merely holding that a slave in England could not be sent back to a
colony for punishment. In contrast, in 1757 the Court of Session had
queried whether the law would countenance the institution of
slavery and in 1778 held that it could not be recognised: Smith, op.
cit., pp. 196-197, making appropriate qualifications because of the
remnants of the laws in Scotland on indentured labour, abolished in
1799.
27
F. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, published in
1845 in Leipzig, was based on these reports. Engels in turn
influenced Marx. A reading of Capital, Vol. 1, shows the great extent
to which Marx relied of the same reports for his facts and certain
analyses.
28
Significant Conventions not ratified are No. 33 (in force since 1935)
on the minimum age for non-industrial workers, No. 105 (in force
since 1959) on the abolition of forced labour and No. 131 (in force
since 1972) on the fixing of minimum wages. Continuance of nonratification
has been decided by Governments drawn from both
major political parties. The 1973 Convention on the minimum age
(No. 138) has also not been ratified. 78 out of 169 Conventions had
not been ratified by the United Kingdom by December 1, 1989: List of
Ratifications of Conventions, International Labour Office, (Geneva,
1990).
29
Winston Churchill, The Second World War, (Cassell, London, 1950),
Vol. Ill, pp. 385-400. The British War Cabinet put social and
economic rights firmly in the international sphere. Henceforth such
rights were claimed as well as traditional human rights.
30
See Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), Chapter xiv, some of Bentham's views
on rights are conveniently printed in "Nonsense upon Stilts,"
Jeremy Waldron, ed., (Methuen, 1987); for a comparison of Bentham
and Hohfeld, see Ross Harrison, Bentham, (Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1983), Chap. 7; one upon whose work Hohfeld built was John
Salmond, Jurisprudence, (London, 1902); another was John Chipman
Gray, Nature and Sources of Law, (New York, 1909); other predecessors'
work is discussed in Roscoe Pound, "Fifty Years of Jurisprudence,"
(1937) 50 H.L.R. 557 at 571-572; and Hohfeld's two essays,
originally printed in 1913 and 1917 in the Yale Law Journal,
posthumously published as W. N. Hohfeld, Fundamental Legal
Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning and Other Legal Essays,
W. W. Cooke, ed., (Newhaven, 1919).
Hart's revival of discussion was preceded two years earlier by
Margaret MacDonald, "Natural Rights," Proceedings of the Aristotelian