Conclusion

The respective manifestos of the political parties for the General Election on 7 May 2015 will inform the public. Did the United Kingdom explain signing the European Convention on Human Rights in 1950 as part of the long history of English constitutional law (as the majority asserts in the report of the Commission on a Bill of Rights), or did it rationally justify its signing of the Convention in the general political history which had manifested itself in a much longer-standing factor of the development of international human rights law, which began as early as the League of Nations in 1919? No doubt the parties’ manifestos which threaten the debate on the future parliamentary attitude to the Human Rights Act 1998 will emerge unscathed.

One of the most striking differences between the Covenant of the League of Nations in 1919 and the Charter of the United Nations in June 1945 has been that human rights found no place in the confer­ence report. Apart from some references in Article 23 to ‘fair and human conditions of labour’ for everyone, and to ‘just treatment’ of the native inhabitants of dependent territories, there was no men­tion of human rights during the drafting of the Covenant. Yet there was a good deal of debate about the obligations of all League mem­bers to respect religious freedom and to refrain from discrimination on the basis of religion. This is not to say that human rights had not been raised during drafting sessions. The concept of international human rights was at least embryonic. By the time of the Second World War, there were angry pronouncements that activated the delegates at the conference at Dumbarton oaks, a mansion belong­ing to Harvard University, between August and October 1944, prior to the establishment of the United Nations at San Francisco. Significantly, American involvement was evident.

Whereas before the Second World War the idea of giving human rights a positive political response was advocated by a few com­mentators, it was itself stimulated through the mainstream of public discussion. A flood of publications emerged, of which the most sig­nificant was President Roosevelt’s peroration on the Four Freedoms, when addressing the US Congress on 6 January 1941. The opening passage in his speech is telling: ‘In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential freedoms’, after which he set out as the freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, the freedom from want and the freedom from fear. That was not entirely novel, even if until then it had not been publicly pronounced. It reflected a determina­tion of the US Government to avoid a repetition of the failure after the First World War when the Senate had withheld its approval to the Covenant of the League of Nations, for which President Woodrow Wilson had advocated at the Paris Peace Conference. But behind the political pronouncements, the scene had been set in the 1930s.

On 23 October 1939, HG Wells wrote a letter to The Times in which he referred to ‘the extensive demand for a statement of war aims on the part of young and old, who want to know more pre­cisely what we are fighting for’, but also to the practical responsibil­ity of making any statement in terms of business, federations and political ramifications at the present time.

This burgeoning of scholarship in the international law of human rights was promoted by two eminent emigres, the first of whom was Professor Mandelstam, a Russian jurist who had been a diplomat in the Tsarist government. He fled the Bolshevik revolution and devoted his studies to international law in Paris, as did another emigre, Professor Frangulis, a Greek jurist who had represented the Greek government at the League of Nations from 1920 to 1922. In 1926 he founded the International Diplomatic Academy which organised conferences and published in the field. One of the first actions of the Academy was to set up the study of the protection of human rights. The safeguarding of human rights was always a fea­ture of Frangulis' activities.

HG Wells' Rights of Man was a huge publishing success. It achieved widespread recognition and support. The human rights movement of the period between the two world wars undoubtedly influenced events both during and after the Second World War. Did these events directly or indirectly lead to the establishing of the Council of Europe in 1948 and its judicial creation of a Commission and Court of Human Rights? Professor AW Brian Simpson, in his massive work Human Rights and the End of Empire,^[48] concludes thus:

The explanation why the United Kingdom promoted and ratified the convention must be sought not in the history of English constitutional thought, but in the general political history of the period. It was a prod­uct of British foreign policy, not of the British legal tradition, much less of British domestic policy. The belief in governmental circles that it was in Britain's interests to take the most prominent part of any of the major powers in the human rights movement, both in Europe and in the United Nations, arose as an aspect of the conduct of international affairs (italics supplied).

Professor Simpson notes that, unrelated to international affairs, there was another, much more long-standing factor emanating from the domestic politics of the pre-war years. This is that Britain was a country that protected its citizenry under the rubric of the rule of law. This tradition was founded in part on the habit of avoiding any written document guaranteeing any rights or duties. It is an attitude that prevails in limiting the extent of international activity. But the rights and duties safeguarding citizens in legal form are separate and distinct, ever in harmony, never in harness.