 Merdan fydd yma. Mae'r Llyfrgell Cymru yn ffasgau o'r cwbl ymddangos iawn... ...llewch ar gwybodaeth яr wirionedd yr ysgrifenni... ...yngoydd oclubodol Llyfrgell Llyfrgell. Mae yw Llyfrgell, yn ei wnaeth i'ch gwbl yn Bwyd, ac am gyfrifeddiol... ...a coleg yma ymgylchedd yw'r gyllid... ...yna mwy o gyfan mae'r Llyfrgell am yr Llyfrgell hon i... ...on purpose am ymlaen i ddweud ar y ffasgau'n hyn... Ie gwaith y cyfnod am y dyfodol ac yn gweithio y Darlwyr yn ein law, mae'n hynny'n wrth gwrs yma ar gyfer y cy tackle ac yn gyfwil yng Nghymru, a mae'r hynny'n ddechrau'r llyfr yn cael ei ddigon o'r llyfr yn gwybod, ac mae'n gweithio'r llyfr yn cael ei ddigon o'r llyfr yn cael ei ddigon o'r llyfr. Fel Lleisdyn Denham, Yr Profi Garethor. Yn cyfnod, mae'n dechrau'n gweithio'n cael ei ddigon o'r llyfr, ac mae'n gweithio'n cymryd ar gael, I will not be searching, so I will try to avoid myself. I am going to speak, I think, unless I run out of ideas till about a quarter to two. I am looking forward to questions, if you have any, or comments. I will tell you why, because this is quite seriously a kind of work in progress because I have to write this book for polity press and their Cambridge press and they go in for short books and they publish them in a way that is quite attractive and they go all around the world. This is some kind of series called Pathways the 21st century or something, so I am trying to write for a non-lawyer and an international market and it is really quite tricky. The book is called Liberty and Security and it is about 40,000 words. How do you capture what you think to be the essence of this in such a short space in a way that is appealing to a readership that is not a legal readership so much unnecessarily and also an international readership? That is what I am sort of caught up in and I gave you guys a number of options that were sort of rubberising or trying to remember what I said in the last book or there was this and I was slightly anxious when you went for this because of course it is less easy for me than rubberising and trying to remember what I wrote in the last book. So here we go. I am going to read bits of it which are slightly for me complicated and then I am going to wing it a little bit and that will mean I can keep an eye on the time and I can look forward to critical questions. I have to say that there is another thing that occurs to me too which is this whole business of writing books during in an age of the internet and in an age of blogging and in an age of Twitter is really kind of preoccupying me a little bit because with the fair wind and this book delivered in May it will be out in 2013 and it seems so odd now and also the it is a package of stuff that I am not supposed to let anybody see until they go into a shop and buy it and I would like your opinion on how as academics who obviously want to be able to prove that they are scholars as a part of their job to get the money but academics who apart from needing to do that want to influence events how they should do it because I had a choice this morning I was asked to do a thing for the Guardian Unlimited I think they are called on the Court of Appeal judgement in the St Paul's Occupy case on Wednesday I spoke out in the tent on Monday night which was great fun the university, they have a university, a tent university I saw Trevor there actually, was it you Trevor or was it somebody else? Sympatical Leeds can turn people very odd so no you weren't there, very good, very good and I chose to work on this paper rather than do that it's quite an interesting, as a practical matter when you have spare only a limited amount of time what you choose to do, it's quite an interesting point you could endlessly blog and not do the work that you're supposed to do but if you do only the work that you're supposed to do and nobody reads it you do nothing anyway it's a thought, it's a thought so comment both on substance if you will and also I'd be interested in modes of expression so here goes first of all I'll talk a little bit about the meaning of these two words and I'll read from the start of the book I'll talk about the remit of the book or my ambition for it and then I'll talk about how it works as a structure so here we go there are a few words more dangerously confusing in their meaning than liberty and security the first has a range which takes it across a spectrum from the essence of human freedom at one end to a far narrower statement about the need for unrestrained movement at the other liberty is sometimes thought of as concerned with the individual cry individual and on other occasions with the individual within society at one moment the word seems to be about the need to be left alone by all authority while at the next it positively suggests active participation in the government of the day no one seems quite sure whether liberty is in any of its incarnations the same as civil liberties and even if it is there are as Jeremy Waldron pointed out at least four separate meanings to this term civil liberties as for the lawyers in pre-rights days they got into the habit of thinking of civil liberties as primarily concerned with the law on the control of police powers and this is the space that the subject still occupies in legal practice by the way that liberty security has a similar range and equivalent level of vagueness used in conjunction with liberty security has been historically taken to refer to national security to the protection from external and perhaps even internal threats of particular lands which are organised as states the field of counter-terrorism has grown out of this orientation of security towards protection from attack taking a different approach we now see also the idea of security being reconfigured for the global age as something called human security an idea of protection that focuses on people not places and which tries to get beyond immediate attacks on freedom to systemic failures in the public sphere that render us all in a much broader sense less secure so lurking in the background is the idea of security as a guarantor of well-being captured in the contemporary term social security which is now so familiar to us that we have forgotten the startling idealism and ambition that once oozed through those two words social security now paradoxically in a way I will explore this uncertainty over meaning the meaning of liberty and security does not detract from their power as positive signifiers the first liberty suggests freedom and unconstrained self a life lived to the full flourishing limit the second secures the space for such a life hedging it against the threats that might destroy it seeing off the intrusions that threaten to make this success impossible in this way as a signifier security communicates a kind of something like a platform for liberty a launching pad and a safe landing place for the soaring self these words echo across European languages and carry this implication so there is kind of oddity about words that you can show have various meanings which are difficult to one pick and yet words which carry positive connotations which seem unaffected by this range of meanings they're not rendered redundant by the variety of meaning that can be accorded to them so I was thinking about that and the book will be about what these words mean the shape that they have taken through time and from place to place how much they have been realised and for me this is the key thing and for how many people how can we have these doubts over meaning and at the same time have such agreement on their positive connotations how can words surrounded by such bonami be thought to be confusing well I think what matters about liberty and security and what I'm going to concentrate on in my book and what I think begins to answer that paradoxical point is the question of the reach of the benefits that each so powerfully evokes being the central question it is the for how many issue that will concern me it's these questions to whom our liberty and security to be extended is it to be to all or just the few if it is to be to all is it through community, state, regional or international action if it's guaranteed for all how practical in their reach will these theoretical commitments prove themselves to be or to put this in a cruder way for all the fine talk what will really be going on on the ground today the central arguments I say over liberty and security to which these qualifications about meaning are to some extent peripheral have always been about this issue of remit, reach rather to ask if liberty is constituted by freedom from external constraint rather than freedom to access the necessities for a good life is immediately to raise the question of whose freedom we have in mind our answer will reveal whether we are thinking of those already in a position to live a decent life and to want to protect it or those for whom presently it is a faraway dream equally when we talk of personal security or national security or human security or as I indicated earlier even social security it's immediately clear that our differences with each other will be mainly about who is to enjoy these valuable protections not what it means to be safeguarded in this way so here's what my argument is going to be in these 40,000 words this book will set out to track the breadth of these terms through time tracing the fluctuating range of beneficiaries that are to be found within their remit it argues for a particular approach one that regards the benefits of liberty and security as being rightly available to all and thereby capable of reaching, being required to reach the many rather than the few so viewing liberty and security in this all-inclusive way is going to shape my approach to the past work these words have done and the present meaning that I say should be accorded to them this is not as easy as it looks it's certainly a pathway of the type that I indicated right at the start I need but it's not as easy as it looks neither term has been routinely understood in such broad terms indeed, as we shall see the primary understanding of liberty and security in the pre-democratic era was always narrowly selective as to who was to benefit from the opportunities afforded the one and the safety delivered the other so that was a kind of pre-democratic reading of liberty and security and it was only when the radically egalitarian idea of community self-government took hold on a national scale that liberty and security found themselves open to being wrenched out of their elitist corrals and offered to all democracy gave the universalist readings of liberty and security an entry point and strong support but it could not by itself deliver effortless supremacy so I have the pre-democratic and then I have the democratic but the democratic period has certain defects which I explore, which I'll indicate this is because the democratic victory, the republican victory was in itself incomplete a freedom for all that was invariably not forged afresh but rather tentatively grafted onto pre-existing society a society that had been designed for the few old elite readings of liberty and security this persisted into the democratic era jostling for space with their egalitarian interlopers and now as we drift towards a post-democratic model of government or what I might call neo-democratic a third generation if you want of ways of looking at the world we see a polity that increasingly wears democratic clothes as a disguise rather than a proud necessity we see these old pre-democratic meanings of the terms returning into popular use underpinning and explaining readings of liberty and security which are ostentatiously universal but falsely so words that hide inequality and unfairness by seeming to reach all when in fact in their practical impact they are tailored to the few so here's, I'm put it another way because I wasn't sure that would be understood in the book and you have to draw all these people in so here goes my thesis my thesis is that we need to recover and re-energise true universalism in the way we use these terms liberty and security here are two words that grew to prominence when they worked they did was at the service of the few but which under the energetic influence of the democratic impulse became goals towards which it was right for government to work on behalf of all now that this expansionist trend has been halted by a drift away from democratic fundamentals and back towards elite readings of liberty and security albeit these versions remain cloaked in apparently universalist language an echo of past, more egalitarian times now that all that's happened the contention here is that we need to grab back and restore these democratic readings the version of liberty and security for which I argue the universalist version has three great allies products, two of them the democratic phase, I'll go through them these allies are in a way somewhat weak for reasons that I'll explain these three great allies have had a beneficial impact on the reading of liberty and security as universal the first is as I've already indicated this impulse for democratic government the second is the notion of the rule of law and the third is respect for human rights now the push for democratic government I would regard as the main driver behind the insistence that the privileges of the few should be made available to the many the second, the rule of law predates the democratic turn but compliments it maintaining that everyone must be subject to the same laws and just as critically that the maker of any given law should not at any one at the same time be its authoritative interpreter the third, the human rights movement of more recent origin at least insofar as we understand that idea today the very way that it describes itself reveals a commitment to an egalitarian vision of the world one in which we should all have a right to the freedoms that were once thought the privilege of the few and human rights today reach beyond the protection of liberty to encompass rich readings of human security the sort that democratic government once made popular so these three big ideas democracy, the rule of law and human rights are universalist in their structure they push societies that commit to them towards equality or in the language of this book liberty and security for all in this neo-democratic phase into which I argue we have drifted they present a problem a challenge to the version of truth that seeks to assert a new elite common sense because this victory is not yet complete neo-democracy has had to accommodate these contrarian pushes for universal freedom within its model but without losing the drive back to privilege which is its primary model the reason it has managed to impose itself in the first place so we have seen not just the wearing of democratic disguises for authoritarianism but also attempts to bypass the rule of law and to distort the meaning of human rights so radically that the term turns into a legitimate sorry a legal legitimator of oppression rather than the passport of freedom that it ought to be this neo-democratic term the world in which I argue we live increasingly today wants us to regard democracy the rule of law and human rights as outmoded old hat ideas incapable of coping with the challenges of the modern global world the rise of extremism climate change the movement of capital, population growth, refugees etc its proponents, conscious and unconscious are happy to see these phrases contaminated by misuse forsaken by those who should love them as creatures of illusion and hypocrisy liberty and security that is liberty and security for all and not just the already empowered few depends on recovering their finest meanings and using them as offensive weapons against the onward surge of the overprivileged minority whose ideal world would see liberty and security as their exclusive preserve alone so basically that's the structure of the book there are these three phases pre-democratic which I'll turn to in a minute versions of liberty and security then a democratic impulse which produces the democratic movement which is assisted by the rule of law brings on board the idea of the protection of human rights all of which stand for the universalist reading of liberty and security but each of which is incompletely realised because of the lack of deep embedding embedment of the democratic idea and of the republican idea and so that idea is never complete and it has these weaknesses and so when we move into the situation where in the moment I would argue where we are returning to the elitist readings of liberty and security we are doing so under cover of democracy the rule of law and human rights but that is a kind of camouflage for change rather than a genuine deployment of those terms I'm trying to make the book universal and I have in mind Russia it's a sort of democratic human rights rule of law at the moment it's a kind of sort of the dystopian future now the book then you know I talk about this pre-democratic and I do a lot I'm not going to read all this bit out don't worry on Hobbs because I think Hobbs is really important I did a big long paper on Hobbs and I've used a lot of that to try and get under the skin of this subject because I think Hobbs is very important to how we read liberty and security and also I think how England reads liberty and security is very important to the world we can't undo colonialism we can't undo the power of England and I use England not the United Kingdom of course so these tropes are having universalist dimension which is regarded as rude to point out because it suggests that only the top thinkers are English well I'm just commenting on influence and this is the way I read Hobbs's importance I'll read bits of it but not all of it in his first major work Elements of Law Thomas Hobbs saw liberty in fairly simplistic terms I don't mean that as offensive I mean that as a compliment actually as a capacity to act or to forbear from acting which capacity leads naturally to deliberation as between rival paths should I go with my appetites or let my fears triumph and this in turn produces a decision the will to act or not to act as the case may be what is marvellous about Hobbs and for its day highly original is how he relegates reason to a sideshow to the main event it's all about emotions feelings, wants, aversions in this world of blameless liberty we naturally desire what is good for us and seek to avoid what is bad for us and above all famously of course as people know what for Hobbs is bad is death and therefore fleeing from death becomes our thing and as Quentin Skinner upon whom I rely for a lot of this puts it in Hobbs and Republican liberty it was for Hobbs obvious that we have a natural tendency to do everything we can to preserve our lives now here's the move because this disposition is so very reasonable we must therefore have the natural right to act to preserve ourselves at all costs so arguably in the modern world he's the first human rights guy but this of course raises problems there is not enough of the world to go round there are too many of us exercising our natural right to do whatever we want at the same time we couldn't all be simultaneously satisfied that's why he ends up saying the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short and then quoting Skinner a lovely quote the desperate paradox on which Hobbs's political theory is grounded is the greatest enemy of human nature is human nature itself now the way out of this conundrum is lies and obliging ourselves to forbear from acting according to our will and power this requires submission to a sovereign to whom we are henceforth to be quote as absolutely subject as is a child to the father or a slave to the master in the state of nature because liberty is impossible our submission to the protective force of the sovereign is practically absolute Hobbs does have some sense of inalienable rights as far as I can tell but these do not figure prominently in his thinking and he never seriously contemplated any kind of right of revolution against an iniquitous sovereign as far as I can tell his description of his later book Leviathan was as a work that now stands that now fights on behalf of all kings and all who whatever name they have hold regal rights stands as a description I think of the kind of thing that he was doing so here's a story that produces an absolute abnegation of liberty in the name of security and a handing over of responsibility for security to an unquestioned monarch now that's one version of liberty and security which is pre-democratic but at exactly the same time there is emerging a republican reading of liberty and security and that's recovering past versions of freedom which see freedom as living in a free state so much broader than the narrow common sense approach of Hobbes and I use the obvious example of the levelers who've been written about very well by Martin Lachlan recently and also Stephen Sedley and lots of others they were an operation that were around the mid-1640s and they produced a document which Martin calls a landmark in constitutional history which apart from setting out the rudiments of a system of representative responsible accountable and democratic government demanded also that laws ought to be equal this is a quote from the levelers laws ought to be equal so that they must be good and not evidently destructive to the safety and well-being of the people so in this last phrase the safety and well-being of the people that the law should not be evidently destructive of that you have my vision of security which is sort of the word safety and liberty which is well-being for all the people so I put up these kind of alternative versions of liberty and security the first leading to absolute power on the part of the monarch the second calling for a free stay now on one version the second of those has clearly won the idea that you need to live in a free state a republican state a democratic state has become the norm and the rule of law is seen as facilitative of that and that in turn has produced versions of security that echo the levelers commitment to safety for all and I go through a little bit of this but not a lot the obvious highlights are the development of a kind of welfare system in Germany in the 19th century the web minority report the development of labour administration in the 20th century and welfare not warfare temple during the war and the four freedoms of Roosevelt culminating in the kind of human rights movement after the war so there's sort of a way in which democracy delivers versions of liberty and security that fit with my universal reading and the rule of law and human rights are part of that now you will already anticipate because I've already said my theories see democracy, republicanism version of liberty as vulnerable because of certain weaknesses in the embedding of republicanism, democracy in our culture and these weaknesses are to be found in the way in which democracy embedded itself and in its half complete or less complete triumph than we sometimes assume and that then leads on to certain problems in our approach to the rule of law and human rights and these three together have made us vulnerable to what I've called this kind of neodemocratic retaliation so that's what I'm going to do in the last few minutes I have so let's look at the ways in which I say that republican triumph has been less complete than the universal democratic narrative would have us suppose this is not entirely about form though of course the United Kingdom in common with many other democracies does remain distinctly non-republican in its retention of the monarchy and at least some other seemingly republican states find themselves applauding by their vote members of the families of elected rulers the obvious example are the Bushes but Lee Huan Huw in Singapore and a depressing number of similar examples drawn from post-colonial Africa the main point is that though the vote has been conceded and participation in the governing of the state guaranteed to all but the entirely incompetent this has not produced the renaissance of free born citizens that many proponents of this vote would have believed would follow the evidence for the imperfect success of the democratic impulse I would say is more importantly evident or seen in the continuing power of private money in the systemic defects in prevailing constitutional orders from a democratic point of view the conservative tendencies of state bureaucracies the lure of populist nationalism the temptation to indulge in a rhetoric of fear and the lack of energetic engagement in self-governance revealed by many citizens our republican democratic form of government does not operate in practice in the way that it was assumed by the optimist that it would the situation has been compounded by the tensions generated by the fear of external attack and internal subversion on which more shortly now that sort of part of what's gone wrong in a way are not gone wrong but what renders democracy less effective than you might have expected and therefore less invulnerable but there's another one and I think it affects it theoretically in a very important way a second aspect or a further aspect to the imperfect triumph of republican ideas relates to a failure to think through properly what individual liberty in a free state entails as a matter of personal as opposed to social freedom maybe it's because the language of human rights did not apply here with their focus on the individual with their setting up of a framework for resisting particular state action against individuals other than in defined and defensible circumstances whether or not this is the case it is clear that republican thought emphasised as liberty the living in a free state and security as the defence of the free state in a way that certainly didn't pay much attention to the individual and could be construed as practically Hobsian in the blank cheque that it gave to authority albeit this time a different kind of authority republican democratic rather than despotic in a free state matters of security national state security are too often left to a single actor without further accountability and that state's rhetoric of political liberty is a rhetoric about living in a free state not protecting individuals within the state so even that great republican figure John Milton was unabashed in his willingness to act against Catholics but perhaps more seriously from the perspective of this argument was perfectly happy to clamp down on sedition albeit he opposed and he's the best one he opposed controls on publication in advance but not laws against sedition the qualified nature of the republican triumph combined with this failure of democratic imagination when it came to individual as opposed to collective freedom served to generate a strong undercurrent of hostility to universal liberty throughout even the golden democratic age of freedom this insecurity has afflicted democratic states and when allied to this republican tendency to subjugate the individual to the needs of the republic has produced a series of harsh assaults on individual freedom that have taken place within and been justified by the free state rather than been in opposition and at odds with it well why has this been so easily permitted why has republican versions of freedom which have been so abusive of the rights of individuals in the protection of the state not generated more energetic opposition from the citizens themselves and this takes me to the second incomplete embedding which is that of law now obviously law the rule of law predates democracy but it has in those countries which have adopted republican forms of government led to a large number of cases where courts have quite explicitly supported executive action in the name of the security of the state and have done so without probing deeply into the individual circumstances before them the famous maxim is deployed in some of the cases in michael's and block I think from 1918 the salos populis supreme alex the safety of the people is the supreme law and so what we've seen is that law has taken its cue from republican concerns for security and not stood up for the individual within the system where the state's security has been at stake also increasingly in this neo democratic phase we're going through when laws engage on behalf of the state the response of the state is to bypass the law and so what we have at the moment in this country at the moment is quite a lot of efforts to marginalise the courts by being able to take decisions outside the judicial system in quasi judicial administrative frameworks which are without the same kind of level of engagement that courts would bring this is slightly it's a variant on the point support the safety of the state the old way or if courts flex their muscles and engage they find the state manoeuvring to avoid them and so you see special advocates control orders t-pims and a whole story about the way in which the administrative state is returning which is standing outside the framework of law so the courts are okay if they do nothing and bypassed if they do something but neither of those points is the one I want to just bring back to you here before I go on to the human rights thing and finish the point I want to make here is that Hobbes is connected to this in I believe quite an important way and let me see, I'll need to read some of this to try and articulate it Hobbes' theory required that liberty be extensive in the residual sense of being in the presumptive position and at the same time vulnerable to aggressive state action capable of being smashed if Leviathan judges such repressive action to be essential to the safety of the state it has been an English law that the residual theory of liberty promoted in the 9th century by Dicey among others has really bedded down enjoying to this day an eminence in constitutional law teaching that is only being very slowly eroded by the move to rights so you are free to do what you want unless the state decides that you shouldn't now Hobbes' combination of an outlandishly extreme commitment to individual freedom on the one hand you can do whatever you want with a deep precariousness so far as the protection of such liberty is concerned not if Leviathan moves against you is only experienced as precarious if the contingent nature of the exercise of your freedom is before you all the time if it is not if Leviathan rarely intrudes on you your family or your immediate community in other words the people you know then the fragile the fragility inherent in your liberty is not the foreground of your way of thinking it is the freedom you experience not the ease with which it is taken away so there are two kinds of people the people who enjoy liberty in a republic who don't really think anything is going to happen and the people who have the possibility of things happening at the forefront of their minds all the time because they know that Leviathan stroke the republic might move against them these may be for example alleged revolutionaries suspected terrorists tiff cullness foreigners who are said to seek to subvert the state from within but because they are not you or like you and of course you never meet them their vulnerability does not register in designing a system which turns everything over to Leviathan while assuring the majority that Leviathan will not challenge their freedom to pursue their individual appetites as they wish as long as they do not rock the boat Hobbes produced an artifice which has remained attractive long after the monarchs and despots for whom he has argued were slung from centre stage it has endured right into the democratic era a time when servitude may have disappeared but a recognisably hobsy an apolitical selfish passivity has if anything fuelled by its compatibility with capitalist modes of thought come into even more prominence so we do not experience the vulnerability that those who are possibly going to be moved against by Leviathan experience so that's the weakness in the rule of law which is in turn made possible by the weaknesses in the lack of a complete democratic engagement which is primarily about ignoring the individual well what about finally human rights now it seems to me that human rights are potentially the saviour of I mean it's funny I say this but the saviour of the democratic framework because they actually by prioritising civil and political insist on readings of society that are democratic but by focusing on the individual they remind you that liberty is about more than a theory of freedom that it has an immediate protective consequence for everybody now of course it can be mis-deployed as I said at the start and of course the neodemocratic trend does mis-deploy the language of human rights you can have a human rights commitment which is simply there as a constitutional requirement and which is ignored a bit like maybe Jordan's commitment not to torture people and when the European Court of Human Rights analyses it does sort of offence taken that it might be subjected to some empirical test or Russia's membership of the Council of Europe which it sees as not incompatible with the invasion of a fellow council member so you can have simply a sort of empty signification or you can have human rights which serve to legitimise in law human rights attacks and so you have systems whereby you can act against marginalised groups and insofar as any of the individuals in the groups then seek to assert their human rights you do have a judicial framework but the judicial framework is so designed to ensure that the end of the process produces an approval of the action as human rights consistent rather than human rights abusive so cases like the I don't know the Kettling case the protest which was compatible with their human rights the St Paul's eviction appeal which I think the judge was right but I'm not wearing a party propagandist point here but which goes through article 10 the right to freedom of protest which points out that actually it's not available in private property which says therefore the removal of the protestors anytime soon is compatible with their human rights is not in a front of them removes even the weapon of protest on the basis of the infringement of human rights because the answer is actually we've checked and your human rights are fine as you are removed you know of course that is a possibility and an even more an even more dangerous one in a way is the way in which the language of human rights has become a stick with which to beat other cultures so in this uriner your out which the republican idea I suppose of a sort of homogenous state lends itself to you have situations where you can define a culture as one that is supportive of the rule of law and supportive of human rights and supportive of democracy in the abstract and that somehow rather gives that culture an advantage over other lesser cultures which are not so supportive and that's an idea about human rights which is independent of practice and what you actually do and so that would be for example in its more extreme form what might you have argued for where you have the entitlement to engage in the lesser evil because it's lesser it's less evil even though objectively the thing you're doing might be the same it's less evil because you are defending your own culture and we see a little bit of that with the government's latest prevent and contest where they are defining extremism not as violent extremism but as a rejection of our values and so they're arguing for a move to prevent violent sorry a move to prevent extremist speech independent of any connection with violence so obviously the language of human rights can be mis-deployed it can be either just an empty veneer or it can be used through judicial action to legitimise what looks to everybody else as a breach of human rights or it can be turned into a positive weapon with which to beat other cultures and even underpin military action of course it can but the concentration that human rights gives you on the individual allied to its determination to have a democratic system which is a real one with most recently in this country the determination that prisoners should have the right to vote which is fantastic because it's getting us to think differently it's actually a way of addressing the weaknesses in the democratic achievement which weaknesses have made us vulnerable to this if you aren't using it again right at the end the Russian model vulnerable to a drift towards a camouflage authoritarianism and which enables us somewhat to both resist that and energise the rule of law and democratic ideas to resist so I'm really all-fashioned I think these were fantastic ideas I think they are universal and I think that we should not fall into the trap of believing somehow or other they're outdated, jaded, tired democracy, the rule of law and human rights because these are the three universals that make it possible to reimagine the society in which there is liberty and security for all Abef stop thank you very much