Fluent Radical

The Americans are getting worked up because of a new law, McCain-Feingold, that makes it a crime to screen certain political ads before elections. As a Brit, I’d love to have their problems. Here in Britain it’s basically illegal to screen any political ads at any time by any one.

Parties can’t screen ads for their candidates (they get a few `official’ broadcasts that each last 5 minutes in the run up to elections, you can imagine how much they get watched). But also, independent groups can’t screen ads that in any way touch on politics. In Britain, you can’t run an ad that supports or opposes a bill, just as you can’t run issue ads that say, call for lower taxes. Nope, all against the law.

We also have speech codes, produced by the regulator Ofcom, that require `impartiality’ and no `undue prominence of views and opinions’ from broadcasters. Note that this is ridiculous since in Britain, the media are without question left-wing to varying degrees. In practice, `impartiality’ means adhering to the dominant centre-left line of the BBC. This makes things like partisan talk radio a punishable offence. No Howard Stern or Hugh Hewitt over here. Both illegal. Certainly no FOX.

I’ll reiterate that this isn’t just during election season, this is ever.

To American conservatives, think how much more dominant the left-wing MSM would be now if your parties and organisations had been banned from ever screening ads, if talk radio was banned, and if FOX news could never have been founded. Here in Britain, all those things can never happen, by law.

So by all means criticize the new bill, because for God’s sake don’t let your country end up like this one, but at the same time, you guys are lucky. And free.

The Charter of Fundamental Rights of The European Union (PDF) is a very confusing document. Reading it, I begin to understand why there is so much confusion about human rights in this country.
For instance, it is not spelled out on whom human rights are obligations, but we can infer from the text that the rights apply to private citizens as well as governments.

As support of this claim, Article 3, “Right to the integrity of the person” states that in the fields of medicine “the free and informed consent of the person concerned” must be respected. This must be a right that is binding upon private citizens since it only applies to relations between doctors and their patients.

In addition Article 29 says that “Everyone has the right of access to a free placement service.” This either means:

1. that law cannot restrict a citizens right to consult a free placement service, or
2. that by law, some other people must have an obligation to provide or at least fund this service, free of charge.

Since I think that it means number 2, we discover that indeed, rights in this document place obligations not only on governments but on individuals.

Therefore, we can only conclude that Article 9, “The right to marry shall be guaranteed”, implies that should you wish to marry, a man or woman must be found and compelled to oblige. *

Applying this conclusion to Article 24, which says that children “may express their views freely”, must mean that parents have a duty to allow their kids to speak exactly as they see fit.

The only meaning of Article 13 - “The arts and scientific research shall be free of constraint.” - which is consistent with the rest of the document is that it is a breach of the charter to obstruct a scientist in the execution of his duty. Financial budgets - no matter how large - are a constraint upon research. Therefore, we could provide scientists with all the money in the world, and even then, we wouldn’t succeed in removing the constraint.

As I said, it’s a confusing document. I assume that there are some other documents, perhaps obscure legal opinions, that explain why the text doesn’t actually mean what it says it means. It would be nice if the learned gentlemen who decide (presumbly from inside their own heads) what rights we actually have, could in some way feed this esoteric knowledge back into the text. Otherwise the Charter will remain the obstacle to the understanding of human rights that it is now.

_____________________________________

* Incidentally, if it’s important to give people the right to marry if they wish, isn’t it just as important to give people the right not to marry? If it’s possible that at some point in the future the government could require you not to be married for whatever reason, and therefore we need to guard against that possibility by creating a human right, isn’t it just as plausible that the government could require you to be married, and isn’t that just as much something that we should be protected from with a human right?