Why “Rights & Responsibilities” is bunk
Marcel Berlins: Rights and responsibilities bill is all wrong (from the Guardian)
Marcel Berlins in today's Guardian on one big flaw in the proposed "charter of rights and responsibilities":
Adding responsibilities to rights will not create a "balance" as he claims; it will create a nonsense. The basic flaw is that rights and responsibilities do not logically belong to the same family. They are different animals. They cannot be set off against, or complement, one another. It makes no sense to say: "Here is a right, let's have a responsibility to balance it." If you have a legal right to something and you are denied it, you can go to court and demand it be restored, or that you are compensated.
But most responsibilities or duties are not of that ilk: they are more akin to statements of desirable behaviour by good citizens. That is not something the courts can, or should, be asked to rule upon.
To some extent, I do think responsibilities do complement rights, simply because a right necessarily implies a responsibility elsewhere: someone else's rights equal your responsibilities, such as a parent or other carer having a responsibility to feed a child effectively imply the child's right to be fed. However, that is not the main objection to this ridiculous concept of a "charter of rights and responsibilities".
The main objection is that bills of rights exist to protect the rights of the weak against the powers of the strong when they are wont to overstep the mark. The state has the power to impose responsibilities on the citizens: to levy taxes, to press men (and even women) into the armed forces, to arrest people. This is called making laws. If they wanted to, and without the safety net of rights, they could do far more than this: they could lock you up indefinitely for any reason or none, or give the local lord "rights" over your wife on the night of your wedding. However, laws also protect people's rights: the right not to be robbed or raped, or have one's property damaged or stolen.
The insistence of pairing rights and responsibilities is a result of both reading too many stupid stories in sensational newspapers about people going to excess in claiming rights, often for the purpose of straightforward gold-digging, but also of taking our democratic system for granted. This country has developed into a democracy over centuries, and this record and, perhaps, the welfare state and health service to the point where people regard the state as almost their friend. Of course, the British state does not routinely display the same viciousness as we see in Zimbabwe or Burma, but that does not mean that the citizen does not sometimes require protection from its self-serving employees, as any of the Guildford Four could tell you.
This is why the historical record is of bills of rights, which do not include responsibilities such as paying taxes and doing one's military service, because if they did, there would be no room for the citizen to resist being drafted into pointless, avaricious wars (or having their children drafted when they are needed to run farms or businesses). We might also consider that judicial supervision of the legislature is a recent phenomenon in the UK; other countries, particularly the USA, have had it for much longer, and the suggestion of abolishing the first ten Amendments and leaving the populace at the mercy of the legislature would not be much of a vote-winner there.
The bottom line is that rights mean that people cannot trample over you and get away with it. Some rights everyone has, and some are forfeited by some people (particularly criminals), but everyone has the right not to be mistreated and the right to claim recompense if they are. This should not be confused by raising responsibilities to the same level, because people who are disliked, rightly or wrongly, are often those whose rights most need protecting.
