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The Guardian view: loving liberty means embracing human rights The Guardian view: loving liberty means embracing human rights
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Freedom is alive, spontaneous, forever young. Free is as dogs run, as birds fly and as unchained spirits do. It is the room to race ahead without fear, and perhaps come crashing down – to make our own lives, our own mistakes, in our own way. The living don't need to be to be told what liberty means, because part of being alive is to know. But when it comes to understanding how it was first achieved, we turn to dusty scrolls penned by the dead long ago.Freedom is alive, spontaneous, forever young. Free is as dogs run, as birds fly and as unchained spirits do. It is the room to race ahead without fear, and perhaps come crashing down – to make our own lives, our own mistakes, in our own way. The living don't need to be to be told what liberty means, because part of being alive is to know. But when it comes to understanding how it was first achieved, we turn to dusty scrolls penned by the dead long ago.
The "unalienable rights" to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" were avowedly "self-evident" even in Jefferson's day, and yet – somehow – Americans still hanker to see them written in his own hand, to grasp how these things were woven into their nation's story. Americans still revere, too, their bill of rights, which secured freedoms to believe, to argue and to show overbearing soldiers the door. The New York public library has been displaying both documents ahead of Friday – Independence Day. Next year it will ship both to the British Museum, as part of the 800th birthday celebrations for the most venerable emancipatory parchment of the lot: Magna Carta. The "unalienable rights" to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" were avowedly "self-evident" even in Jefferson's day, and yet – somehow – Americans still hanker to see them written in his own hand, to grasp how these things were woven into their nation's story. Americans still revere, too, their bill of rights, which secured freedoms to believe, to argue and to show overbearing soldiers the door. The New York public library has been displaying both documents ahead of Friday – Independence Day. Next year it, and the US National Archives, will ship both to the British Library, as part of the 800th birthday celebrations for the most venerable emancipatory parchment of the lot: Magna Carta.
To trace living freedoms back to fading ink may seem a fetish. Fusty legal codes feel remote from liberty's essence, and many anachronisms washed up by time's tide. These range from the quaint – guaranteed access to woodland for pigs in Magna Carta's little brother, the Charter of the Forest – through to the sinister. The same US constitution that enshrines many freedoms specifies how slaves are to be weighed up for congressional representation. Magna Carta is just as concerned with protecting the aristocracy's privileged position at the top of the feudal hierarchy as anything else; even today for those at the bottom a failure to address what Franklin Roosevelt called freedom from want can render ancient liberties notional. And, as the right to bear arms that grew out of the exigencies of late 18th-century America demonstrates, literalist loyalty to age-old rights can leave politics hidebound in the face of modern realities.To trace living freedoms back to fading ink may seem a fetish. Fusty legal codes feel remote from liberty's essence, and many anachronisms washed up by time's tide. These range from the quaint – guaranteed access to woodland for pigs in Magna Carta's little brother, the Charter of the Forest – through to the sinister. The same US constitution that enshrines many freedoms specifies how slaves are to be weighed up for congressional representation. Magna Carta is just as concerned with protecting the aristocracy's privileged position at the top of the feudal hierarchy as anything else; even today for those at the bottom a failure to address what Franklin Roosevelt called freedom from want can render ancient liberties notional. And, as the right to bear arms that grew out of the exigencies of late 18th-century America demonstrates, literalist loyalty to age-old rights can leave politics hidebound in the face of modern realities.
For all the reservations, Americans are wise to revere their bill of rights, just as the English – from tub-thumping Tories through to Rumpolesque libertarians – are justified in taking pride in the commitments that King John grudgingly granted at Runnymede. For among the arcane phrases lurk important promises on things like trial by jury, and their place within the national scriptures make them that bit harder to undermine. More fundamentally, both documents embody the idea that it is not merely the individual but also the state that is subject to the law. And that is – today and always – the foundation of real, breathing liberty, since, without it, anybody's desire to do anything can be crushed by arbitrary power.For all the reservations, Americans are wise to revere their bill of rights, just as the English – from tub-thumping Tories through to Rumpolesque libertarians – are justified in taking pride in the commitments that King John grudgingly granted at Runnymede. For among the arcane phrases lurk important promises on things like trial by jury, and their place within the national scriptures make them that bit harder to undermine. More fundamentally, both documents embody the idea that it is not merely the individual but also the state that is subject to the law. And that is – today and always – the foundation of real, breathing liberty, since, without it, anybody's desire to do anything can be crushed by arbitrary power.
No document better captures the many liberating consequences of this principle – for free thinking, free exchange of correspondence (GCHQ, please note) and the freedom to love and marry as we will – than the European convention on human rights. Written by English jurists in the mid-20th century at a time when all these things were violated in Europe, it distilled the protections that the English common law had evolved over centuries, as a gift to a broken continent. The magic of a declaration of independence was never going to come overnight but, after two-thirds of a century, by now it might have been edging towards sacred status. Instead, it is widely derided. The Conservative party is gripped by a decidedly unconservative urge to chuck this product of experience out of the British courts, by repealing the Human Rights Act, which incorporates it into British law. The home secretary floats the idea of walking away from the convention entirely, a suggestion that the Tory right is bent on getting into the next manifesto.No document better captures the many liberating consequences of this principle – for free thinking, free exchange of correspondence (GCHQ, please note) and the freedom to love and marry as we will – than the European convention on human rights. Written by English jurists in the mid-20th century at a time when all these things were violated in Europe, it distilled the protections that the English common law had evolved over centuries, as a gift to a broken continent. The magic of a declaration of independence was never going to come overnight but, after two-thirds of a century, by now it might have been edging towards sacred status. Instead, it is widely derided. The Conservative party is gripped by a decidedly unconservative urge to chuck this product of experience out of the British courts, by repealing the Human Rights Act, which incorporates it into British law. The home secretary floats the idea of walking away from the convention entirely, a suggestion that the Tory right is bent on getting into the next manifesto.
But if the convention can only survive, at some point it will be revered. One day, a great American museum may want to borrow a 1950 original, to show alongside the United States's own statutes of liberty. When that day dawns, those who would have ripped it up will be remembered as villainously as King John.But if the convention can only survive, at some point it will be revered. One day, a great American museum may want to borrow a 1950 original, to show alongside the United States's own statutes of liberty. When that day dawns, those who would have ripped it up will be remembered as villainously as King John.
• This article was amended on 4 July 2014 to clarify the US sources of the documents to be lent. An earlier version also referred to the Magna Carta exhibition at the British Museum rather than the British Library.