8 January 2008Shami Chakrabarti
Moral authority (not to be confused with religious conviction, age or experience) is going to be the political must-have of 2008. To complicate matters, it is in the eye of the beholder, somewhat relative, and travels in a peculiar way.
For example, the magic words "Scotland Yard" may inspire more confidence in Pakistan than Peckham. No doubt the allegations of multimillion-pound corporate credit-card abuse that have already prompted the resignation of several top officers will seem trivial in that desperately troubled country.
More seriously, our prime minister's busy holiday season, filled it seems with more phone calls to the Commonwealth than mince pies, demonstrates the force for democracy and the rule of law that Britain might still be in the world.
We've all seen Gordon Brown exuding moral authority. When the birth of his premiership was visited by various horsemen of the apocalypse, his calm and unifying response sent him soaring in the polls. The question is how to recapture moral authority lost or tarnished by misplaced child benefit data, donor scandals and anti-terror proposals that can boast only Ian Blair and a well-known topless tabloid for support.
A greater symmetry in the human rights message at home and abroad would provide a helpful contrast with Brown's predecessor. As the new prime minister said last autumn, in direct solidarity with the people of Burma and Zimbabwe: "Human rights are universal and no injustice is for ever." These words sit very uncomfortably with Home Office plans to allow terror suspects to be detained for up to 42 days without charge - a policy that Britain would surely condemn if it were adopted in a younger democracy anywhere.
The judgment would be a lot harder if Liberty hadn't spent years developing alternatives to ever longer periods of detention - the use of intercept evidence, post-charge questioning and even the activation of pre-existing contingency laws at a moment of genuine and temporary emergency. It would be harder if the director of public prosecutions were not adamant that the current limit of 28 days (the longest of any western democracy) is perfectly adequate. For notwithstanding the PM's conciliatory words towards Liberty in recent interviews, the Home Office pre-Christmas paper is a world away from anything we could defend in good conscience or logic. The proposal is not a safety valve for a moment of grave exception subject to parliamentary approval and judicial review. Instead it allows for individuals to be detained for six weeks if the Met commissioner asks nicely. The threshold of operational need is so low that purported legislative and judicial safeguards are meaningless. In the face of so much reasoned argument and wide-ranging opposition, the gap between prime ministerial language and Home Office delivery saps the government's moral authority.
As this prime minister understands, the days of complacency over personal privacy are over. Sure enough the cause of my 74-year-old human rights organisation is not always best served by some recent polemicists trading on the ridiculous overstatement that we now live in a police state. Such ravings may be insulting both to the intelligence of Britain and the oppression of North Korea. However, the greater danger lies in underestimating the legitimate and growing public concern behind the overblown prose.
The bottom line is that privacy does matter; it is inextricably linked with dignity and trust, and helps set the tone for a free and democratic society. Further, respect for privacy matters to everyone, not perhaps as a win or lose the general election issue, but as an indicator of overall trustworthiness and competence.
This should be the year that Brown finally ends his predecessor's great identity-card folly, making clear that existing forms of ID can be made more secure without constructing a grand, greedy and vulnerable central database. Children never charged, let alone convicted, of a criminal offence should immediately come off the national DNA database, whose remit must be rationalised along more defensible lines without delay.
With no change of direction in key areas of human rights policy, both constitutional and social cohesion agendas will be undermined. Just as the infancy of the Human Rights Act was plagued by Tony Blair's "wars" on terror, asylum and troubled youth, any new rights instrument worth its salt will be overworked - forced into the political frontline with no champion to defend it.
Brown was right when he claimed the universal nature of human rights. Nonetheless, this framework of freedom and protection lies at the heart of any "Britishness" worth promoting. If the government fails visibly to break with the shameless authoritarianism of the Blair years, it will allow some on the right to retreat from the shared terrain of universal human rights to the comfort zone of vague, anti-state and xenophobic notions of "citizens' civil liberties".
Moral authority won't come to a government of universal talents but one of universal values. From terror laws to bills of rights, Brown must take the advice he has given to leaders of less stable societies, and reach out to opponents with the consensus of the constructive conversation, not the clunking fist.
· Shami Chakrabarti is director of Liberty www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2237038,00.html
