Our humanity

Speaking in support of a motion calling on the trade union movement to defend the Human Rights Act, Unite director of legal services Howard Beckett highlighted today (September 14) just how important the Act is.

“The principles of collective rights, the protection from enforced slavery, the right of assembly, the right to protest, freedom of speech, the right to belong to a trade union and yes conference the right to withdraw labour — the right to strike — are all protected by the Human Rights Act,” he said.

“These are rights are so important as to be central to international law protected by the United Nations, to be integral to the Scotland Act and to be central to the Good Friday Agreement,” Beckett added.

Quoting Nelson Mandela who said, ‘To deny people their human rights is to deny their very humanity,’ Beckett noted that the Tory government is hell-bent on doing just that.

“Be in no doubt that as the Tory rabble fail to deliver to the right wing zealots the Brexit they so desire — the anti-Europe, insular, xenophobic, racist society they seek — they will look to the exit from the Human Rights Act as their succour to the right wing,” Beckett warned conference.

“They will seek to remove us from the Human Rights Act and claim that this is sovereignty reclaimed.”
He argued too that the so-called Bill of Rights that the government intends to replace the Human Rights Act with “will have at its very heart how to defeat in the courts the very tactics my union has used with such success”.

“No comrades these are our human rights, our core, our essence,” Beckett concluded. “They deserve to be protected by international law not subject to the whims of the ruling elite of government nor the privileged out of touch judiciary. We must be ready to stand with Liberty, Amnesty and others and say ‘our Human Rights Act is our humanity’.

“We must protect our rights.”