From the editor’s desk

HUMAN RIGHTS REVISITED

Every human person is a someone, not a something. The essence of Benedict XVI's New Year message for peace is this simple affirmation that shows how close contemporary concerns for human rights are to gospel values. The Pope's particular point this year was that observance of human rights is the only sure route to peace, together with a warning that an inadequate grounding for the doctrine of rights quickly leads to a demand that they be set aside when they are inconvenient.

Experience in the last year shows how easily that can happen. But there is another problem with the language of rights that the Pope hardly touched on. It arises when rights collide. Three recent British examples illustrate the need for a more sophisticated method for resolving such conflicts. By the use of statutory procedures called Control Orders, the Government has sought to restrict the liberty of individuals who encourage others in terrorism without themselves engaging in it. This undoubtedly violates their rights, as the courts have acknowledged. But there is another invisible party to such proceedings who have even more fundamental rights but who in the nature of things cannot be represented in court - the potential victims of the terrorist outrages that might be committed if the influence of troublemakers were not restrained. This illustrates a tendency in any conflict of rights for immediate and obvious rights to prevail over more theoretical and remote rights.

The second British example illustrates how much this is also a matter of perspective. Homosexual rights lobbyists want religious organisations to be prevented by law from discrim inating  against gays. Anti-discrimination has for them become immediate and absolute. Religious organisations reply that this impinges on their right to religious freedom, their own alternative absolute. Rather than screaming at each other through banners and headlines, the first step to wisdom might be for each side to engage and debate, and even consider a balancing of rights. But this requires a coherent philosophy of rights, a method for arranging them in order of priority, and some way of resolving them. The language hardly exists.

The Catholic Church, with its own coherent thinking, is more likely to arrive at this understanding than most other players in this debate, and indeed could lead the way. But it would also need to recognise how moral absolutes can conflict with other claims. To take a third example, the history of the abortion debate in Britain in the 40 years since the passage of the Abortion Act has seen little progress beyond two rival camps claiming incompatible rights, the right of the woman to health and selfdetermination versus the right of a foetus to life. Neither side concedes any validity to the other side's claims, perhaps afraid that to do so would be seen as weakness. The result is stalemate.

For the Church to admit that the claim to life of a foetus, say in the earliest stages of its existence, was a right to be balanced along with the rights of the woman concerned would be a huge step forward. To accept that both the woman and the foetus are a "someone", not a "something", would be an invitation to dialogue, not a surrender. As the organisation Life has recognised, it could point to ways of meeting a woman's rights other than by abortion. And it would restart a debate that has atrophied these last 40 years, and has served no one's interests.