A remarkable day, but I'm not going to comment on all that, except to say that I'm startled that no-one has mentioned Suez yet as a paradigm-shifting comparison (nationalisation, the threat of a run on the pound: it's got the lot).
No: while we were all discovering how we had become bankers, the Lords was throwing out the government's bid to introduce up to 42 days' detention for suspected terrorists as part of the Counter Terrorism Bill . Obviously, the exhibition has had to engage objectively with this issue, not least as part of the events programme's series of debates, but also as part of the interactive component. Within a few metres of entering the exhibition, you'll discover when Habeas Corpus became part of English law and whether it applies in Scotland, and be able to offer a judgement on the risks and benefits of such a measure.
I was working on the labels for the section dealing with human rights today, finishing of the story of how ideas that were first expressed with any force in the 18th century (by men such as Thomas Paine and women such as Mary Wollstonecraft) took on the force of 'international customary law' because of the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the 20th.
There seemed to be a gap in the story, from the early editions of Paine's Rights of Man and the Foreign Office's deliberations on an international 'Bill of Rights' in 1947. The language of 'human rights' seemed to drop off the agenda. In part, the British response to the French and American Revolutions had some role to play in this, as well as the importance of evangelical and other religious ways of looking at the world in the 19th century; empire, and British self-belief, probably had something to do with it too. In the British context, it seems relatively easy to explain why 'human rights' as a term and a concept dropped off the radar (although this seemed to be the case in the US and the Continent, too), but harder to explain why it resurfaced.
Jay Winter's recent book Dreams of Peace and Freedom (2006) has been especially useful, and is excellent on René Cassin's 'dream of a new human rights regime' during the bleakness of the 1940s. The exhibition is able to show, through some of Cassin's letters to Lord Cecil at the League of Nations, how internationalism and pacifism moved towards an understanding of rights that transcends the state.
But there is also a more British aspect to the story, in particular HG Wells, who in 1939 wrote to The Times proposing an international Magna Carta, or Bill of Rights, to help explain 'what we are fighting for'. His declaration, and the Penguin book The Rights of Man, or What are we are fighting?, was translated into most major European languages and dropped behind enemy lines for propaganda purposes (as was the Beveridge report, also on show). A path from Wells's initial letter, via a Committee on the Declaration, a Daily Herald debate, correspondence with Roosevelt, and the State Department, can be drawn to the final UDHR of 1948.
I looked at Wells's initial letter (or, as it turned out, follow-up letter to an initial statement about war aims) on the British Library's subscription to the Times Digital Archive. The date of the reference from an article was wrong: 25 (not 23) October 1939. But the letter did include Wells's initial points for his proposed International Declaration... one of which was that no-one should be detained without trial for a period of more than three weeks.
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