"Human rights" versus freedom of speech

Free Speech Union event in Belfast was an illuminating lesson in conflicts between "human rights" enforced by NGO-PMC groups, and the rights of ordinary people to speak their minds

Last Friday I went to a rousing event in Belfast organised by the Free Speech Union.

Northern Ireland often considers itself a bit of a backwater, an overlooked, slightly embarrassing step-child of the United Kingdom.  Perhaps as a result of this inferiority complex, Friday’s talk featuring a five person panel had the feel of the coming together of a group of people very grateful for some attention. Organisers said that the Belfast event was the largest they had ever had outside of London. 

For years and years, the six British counties on the island of Ireland got headlines across the world for all the wrong reasons. There was the violence, of course, that claimed the lives of so many civilians. But there were also restrictions of civil liberties and curtailments of speech imposed as a ham-fisted attempt to stop the violence. This last year, however, the south of Ireland has stolen the north’s thunder when it comes to government repression of speech, with an ultra-woke establishment pushing through some of the most draconian speech criminalisation laws yet seen in a democracy.

Like every other English speaking country, the cultural and media establishment in Northern Ireland is thoroughly infected by the progressive-woke, nanny state, ideology that has wrought such destruction elsewhere. So I was somewhat surprised to hear a little bit of positivity for once.  In part a legacy of the Troubles and the political-sectarian divisions that caused it, one of the panelists, lawyer Simon Chambers, pointed out that Northern Ireland has very robust laws against discrimination on the grounds of political belief. This, he hopes, will help him win a legal action  against the owners of a Belfast pub whose staff violently refused service to a group a people who had gone to the pub after attending a Let Women Speak event in April last year. The bar staff of Robinson’s city centre pub not only refused to serve some of the attendees because they were wearing shirts that proclaimed things like ‘Woman: Adult Human Female.” The bar’s manager actually head-butted one of the group, an English gay rights campaigner who had come over to Belfast for the event, leaving him with a cut on his forehead.

Despite these violations, Chambers was reassuring: “the Northern Ireland population has significant access to justice,” he said, with good judges and a good legal system. I’m glad to hear someone being sanguine, for once, about the prospects for free speech.

Outside the legal process, however, Northern Ireland is politically and culturally restrictive and the other speakers on last week’s panel reflected that unfortunate reality. For example, Chambers is also representing a woman, Sara Morrison, who spoke at the same rally in defence of women’s rights. An online harassment campaign immediately ensued. Then few months later her employer, the Belfast Film Festival, succumbed to pressure from trans rights activists, issued a public statement in support of the people targeting her, causing her to take leave from her job due to stress.

The FSU panel provided interesting context for our current climate. One of the speakers, former Ulster Unionist counsellor and veteran gay rights campaigner, Jeffrey Dudgeon, pointed out that Northern Ireland is the “birthplace of identity politics;” and it has been an influential testing ground for bad ideas that are then rolled out in more critical locations. 

“Northern Ireland is a seed bed, a laboratory…for so much that has come to predominate in London and beyond.”

Most glaringly, of course, is the poison at the very core of what we now call ‘woke’ — identity politics — which Northern Ireland pioneered in the brutally pointless 30 year murder spree of neighbour upon neighbour. (I have written about this in this Substack before.)

But Dudgeon also mentioned law fare — a concept now widely discussed in dissident American political circles with politically motivated prosecutions against Trump supporters and of course the man himself stacking up like pancakes in a busy diner. 

“Politics here are largely done through human rights with one-sided law fare rampant,” Dudgeon told the audience. “Rights are instead used to advance identity. Very little of the old, liberal, secular element remains.”

Sound familiar, Americans readers? Well, the Northern Irish professional managerial class has been at this for some time. If this document is anything to go by, “human rights” activists here have been working to undermine fundamental legal concepts with barely a whisper of criticism.

Written by the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission in response to the proposals by the NI Department of Justice to update hate crime legislation here, this response to the public consultation opened by the NI government is extremely alarming. (The proposed changes to NI hate crime law are not nearly as far down the procedural pipeline as the bill in the Republic of Ireland, mentioned above, which could become law this year.)

Published in March 2022, the NI Human Rights Commission document recommends the government create “a unified statutory definition of hate crime” that includes not just the regular ol’ bias and bigotry — but also contempt and hostility. What? I have contempt for male feminists and hostility toward child sex traffickers. Does that mean that I would be committing a hate crime if I say something mean about them on Twitter, Mommy Government? 

These so-called defenders of human rights also want the state to ensure a “presumption against the cross-examination of victims or vulnerable witnesses. The burden should be on the defendant to prove that such cross-examination is required.” So, no automatic right for the citizenry to robustly defend itself when accused of the crime of wrongthink by the state. That’s an interesting take coming from people who are paid by the state.

The overproduction of white-collar professionals in law, social services, and academia means that we have about three generations of busybodies who don’t have enough to do to justify their cushy, often taxpayer funded, salaries. Organisations like the Free Speech Union and those of us who support them, have a lot of lost ground to get back.

Toby Young, a well-known British journalist who was excoriated for years by the ultra-woke British media establishment before going on to start the Free Speech Union, closed out the evening’s remarks with a sobering reminder of what is at stake in the battle for our words. In 2022, the FSU conducted a poll of NI residents, and sixty-one percent of respondents said they felt less free to speak than they were ten years ago. 

We are facing, Young said, “a seemingly coordinated global attack on free speech,” quoting the president of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde’s chilling recent claim that “misinformation” is the “greatest threat facing humanity.” The ultra-elite Lagarde may as well be a million miles away from ordinary people on the streets of humble little Northern Ireland, but nonetheless the plebes here know what’s up. The demand to control what we say amongst ourselves, Young correctly pointed out, “certainly isn’t being driven by popular demand.”