Leaders of repressive regimes will have licence to ignore international human rights standards, warns Mike Cushman. Plus letters from Prof Julian Petley and Margaret Owen
Your editorial on the Tories’ new bill of rights (22 June) makes many important points. It is, however, like almost all of the discussion of this threat to human rights, depressingly narrow and inward-looking. The great danger here is the licence that putting national prejudices above international overviews will give to regimes more directly repressive that our own.
International human rights law is designed to put constraints on the most authoritarian governments. It does this in part by more liberal countries accepting restrictions on their actions and setting a platform of minimum acceptable standards. The British drafters of the European convention on human rights understood this.
