 I'm here today with Jonathan Cooper, a human rights specialist, activist and barrister with experience before English and international courts. How are you Jonathan? Good, very nice to be here with you Aaron. Great, thank you very much for being here. Could you tell us a bit about what led you to become an activist for human rights? I came of age and the age of AIDS and it was just very clear from that experience and my experience of what happened to me and my friends that the UK system of government and then that sort of increased the kind of global world order just doesn't protect human rights effectively enough and so I got very involved in that crisis and worked very deeply within it to try to have a human rights response to it and in fact it's the same with this pandemic with any pandemic the only way in which you are going to overcome them is by a human rights response. I just wondered if you might elaborate a tiny bit further on for somebody who perhaps is less familiar with human rights what a hate human rights based approach looks like in regards to HIV. The key to a successful approach, human rights approach, is that you put the dignity of everyone upfront and you then build an approach that is about guaranteeing and enhancing securing that dignity and you do that then using the right to dignity but also specific in particular rights so if you take the AIDS crisis as we're talking about it you guarantee the rights of sort of personal autonomy through what we would probably call private life rights to everyone affected by HIV you ensure that they have effective family life rights and association rights to push for the further human rights protection and you know the biggest and it goes hand in hand with dignity no discrimination and the commitment to equality. Could you explain our right to dignity and what's your assessment on how the UK fairs in upholding it? Human dignity is literally recognizing the individual worth of all of us and that that individual worth is as important as the collective worth therefore we can't treat people differently simply on the basis of who they are or where they come from we recognize each and everybody's genuine value. Those in power say it's a concept that's unfamiliar to English law or English culture or English or British UK identity which is of course is absurd because the idea that human dignity would be culturally specific is crazy you have as equal human dignity wherever you are in the globe whether you're in Kazakhstan or Kensington it doesn't matter. And so it's been more than 20 years since the introduction of the Human Rights Act how would you assess its effect on the UK? Done exactly what we hoped it would do it's just really really improved the nature of decision making the concept of accountability you know before it entered into force it really there was no really effective way of holding those that made decisions over your lives accountable and now everyone recognizes that it's good to be accountable and the Human Rights Act has done that and obviously in relation to the individual rights it's been very effective you know we have a proper right to protest now we have better procedures in relation to investigations into use of lethal force it's guaranteed us rights that we didn't have before it's absolutely enhanced the rights that we already have it's very hard to see what it is that you would want to change about it unless you don't want effective accountability. Are there any valid ways you feel that HRA could be improved perhaps strengthened or enhanced? It's such an ingenious scheme that we should use it and apply it to get better and more enhanced protection so in relation to economic and social rights would be the obvious one but also environmental protection should fall under the same scheme and so you can imagine a sort of three pillars to the way in which we hold the state and power to account one would be the Human Rights Act the other would be the Environmental Rights Act and the third would be the the act protecting all sentient beings and so there would obviously be a relationship between the three pillars but but then you would really have proper protection in law across the board. Thank you so much again for your time. Brilliant thanks so much Aaron bye