In the 10 years since Human Rights were finally incorporated into domestic legislation very few people can point to how they have affected their lives.
Human rights have been widely portrayed in sections of the media as something that helps those people that in their opinion don't really deserve them, whether they be prisoners, asylum seekers, terror suspects or gypsies and travellers.
In response, the "liberal" discourse about human rights is one where rights come with responsibilities. But this is moralist, pejorative and I would argue ultimately corrosive.
It assumes we have responsibilities not solely to each other (not in itself a bad thing) but also to the state and its institutions. These are no longer inalienable rights that every person has – instead they become negotiable rights that people have to earn by following a set of very subjective and frequently coercive moral imperatives.
However, despite the claims of the Enlightenment, there are no inalienable rights with which people have somehow been endowed. Human rights only make sense when seen as the citizen's defence against the partial and abusive use of power by others. Human rights are simply an expression of society's collective need for legal protection from the abuse of power.
The Human Rights Act (HRA) is in many ways an expression of this 50 years too late, when many struggles for social justice are perceived (I say perceived quite purposefully) to have been won.
We do have comprehensive equality legislation, a minimum wage, women's right to choose, the Data Protection Act, the Children's Act and so forth that, albeit flawed, have offered important new rights to many people. The enshrining of human rights into legislation does not appear to offer most people much beyond these rights already established.
It is in this climate local authorities are asked to consider what more they could do to further the implementation of human rights, to make it a reality and more readily understood and welcomed.
But what does that mean in practice? Will it mean, for example, that disabled people will be able to demand more effective and more extensive social care support to ensure they can take full advantage of their human rights?
Julian Horsler
A casual reading of the Act would suggest it would, or at least should. But this comes in a context of severe funding cuts looming on the horizon which will bite hard into the services disabled people already receive.
Not surprisingly then councils have not embraced the Human Rights Act because, to put it bluntly, it will cost money that councils just don't have.
There is an alternative response however. Human rights attempt to set a baseline (albeit within a limited scope) below which no one in our society should be allowed to fall. Instead of accepting the pain spending cuts will inflict on poorer sections of society as being inevitable we can remember that human rights were invented as a defence against the arbitrary use of power.
When the cuts come maybe, just maybe, the HRA will give local communities a tool with which they can begin to fight back to protect their services. Similarly the introduction of identity cards, the surveillance society and the explosion of personal information held on databases may create the environment where human rights become the common cause uniting disparate elements of society who feel injustice.
Councils can help by articulating how cuts to services will infringe on human rights and by curtailing their own use of power to infringe on the rights of local people. It would be a brave step on the part of council leaders to embark on this road but if they don't lead along it they may just find they are dragged along it.
Julian Horsler is Barnsley council's, equality and diversity manager
