Human Rights and Political Wrongs | Judicial Power Project

Commentary on Sir Noel Malcolm’s “Human Rights and Political Wrongs”

22 Mar 2018 | Human Rights and Political Wrongs

In his recent study for Policy Exchange’s Judicial Power Project, Sir Noel Malcolm (All Souls College, Oxford) considers European Human Rights law and finds it wanting. The European Court of Human Rights, he argues, operates on principles that are incoherent and...

Noel Malcolm | Between Human Rights Theory and Practice: A Reply to Five Commentators

22 Mar 2018 | Human Rights and Political Wrongs

I am very grateful to these five distinguished authors (Professor Finnis, Baroness O’Neill, Lord Phillips, Professor Tasioulas and Professor Verdirame) for taking the time and trouble to comment on my work. Without writing at even greater length, I cannot deal with...

Guglielmo Verdirame | Which theory? Whose bill of rights?

13 Mar 2018 | Human Rights and Political Wrongs

The Human Rights Act (HRA) has been a centrepiece of the British Constitution for almost twenty years. The idea that, over 300 years after the 1688 Bill of Rights, Britain should have a new bill of rights was laudable. But its implementation was a failure of legal and...

John Tasioulas | Feeling our Way: Human Rights as Democratic Beliefs

9 Mar 2018 | Human Rights and Political Wrongs

Chapter 5 of Sir Noel Malcolm’s Human Rights and Political Wrongs examines leading moral-philosophical theories of human rights and issues a damning verdict. Their advocates, according to Malcolm, are just ‘whistling in the dark’. By contrast, he...

John Finnis | Judicial Usurpation and Human Rights

8 Mar 2018 | Human Rights and Political Wrongs

Human Rights and Political Wrongs gives us an unrivalled explanatory checklist of the ways in which the European Court of Human Rights (and so any court that takes its cue from the ECtHR) has expanded the power of judges to declare that laws adopted in a civilized,...

Lord Phillips | Strasbourg Overreach and ECHR Membership

7 Mar 2018 | Human Rights and Political Wrongs

In this book Sir Noel Malcolm advances three propositions. The first is that there is no moral or philosophical basis for human rights; they are essentially political. The second is that the jurisprudence of the Strasbourg Court has been unsatisfactory. The third is...

Baroness O’Neill | The Importance of Justifying Rights

6 Mar 2018 | Human Rights and Political Wrongs

Noel Malcolm is surely right both that human rights standards are important, and that accounts of human rights are currently in some trouble. I think that he is also right that some of these troubles have been brought about not by those who are hostile to or who...

Human Rights and Political Wrongs: A new approach to Human Rights law

12 Dec 2017 | Human Rights and Political Wrongs, Publications

In Human Rights and Political Wrongs, one of the UK’s most eminent historians of ideas offers a powerful critique of the existing system of human rights law, and an original analysis of the fundamental principles on which any such law should be based. As Noel Malcolm...