The Inside Track
Interview with: Shami Chakrabarti
Mike Semple Piggot
Hello I’m MSP And this is The Inside Track. Today I’m talking to Shami Chakrabarti, Director of Liberty. Shami Chakrabarti worked as a lawyer in the Home Office between 1996 and 2001. In September 2001, she became in-house counsel for Liberty, one of the UK’s leading human rights and civil liberties organisation. Since September 2003, she’s been Director of Liberty. Through her work for Liberty she enjoys an international reputation for being a commentator and reasoned critic of those who attempt to erode our human rights. So without further ado, good morning, Shami.
Shami Chakrabarti
Good morning.
Mike Semple Piggot
Thanks very much indeed for coming over.
Shami Chakrabarti
It’s a pleasure.
Mike Semple Piggot
You said in an interview in the Guardian recently, and I quote: “The Human Rights Act is one of the most valuable pieces of legislation on our statute books, enshrining and protecting our common values” - so a bit of an unfair question to start off with, would it really make any difference whether it was a Labour or Tory government?
Shami Chakrabarti
Well, you know, forgive the cynicism to some extent, whoever you vote for the government always gets in, and I don’t mean that to be unduly cynical about politics or about… or about governments, we have to have government. I am a democratic and I believe in democratic government, but there is something… there is something about power that requires that it be held to account. I think that what we try to do at Liberty is to be across-party, non-party campaigning organisation, and there are hawks and doves everywhere, you know, I can say that both on a personal level and on a professional level. I have friends in all of the…..all of the main parties, and there are hawks and doves everywhere. That’s true on national newspapers as…..as well, by the way. And there is Ying and Yang, there are particular issues on which, you know, the programmes and… and likely manifestos of various parties will be more liberty friendly, more…..more human rights friendly. But I think that, you know, who…..whoever wins it’s going to be more important than ever that Liberty and its members are sort of, you know, vigorously scrutinising what is promised, because, you know, all too often it can be very immediate and populist to…..to trample on fundamental rights and freedoms. And, you know, the hot topic for a while has been let’s scrap the Human Rights Act.
Mike Semple Piggot
Yes.
Shami Chakrabarti
It’s a way to look tough. It’s currently something that’s been talked about by the Conservative Party, but previous Labour…..Labour Home Secretaries haven’t loved it very much either.
Mike Semple Piggot
No.
Shami Chakrabarti
And…and it’s a great failing of…..of new Labour that they brought in this modern Bill of Rights and then did so little to promote it, and actually undermined it in thought and word, and deed. I’m not a party political person instinctively, and Liberty is not party political, but I think that particularly in difficult economic times, particularly in moments of strain and of change it’s more important than ever that whoever wins an election is really held quite closely to account.
Mike Semple Piggot
Yes. Well, you describe Lord Bingham as probably the greatest jurist of his generation, and I think that’s probably…..
Shami Chakrabarti
I don’t think….I don’t think I’m alone in that.
Mike Semple Piggot
You’re definitely not alone in that. But just for the benefit of oversees listeners as well, can you just give us a few key thoughts on why the Human Rights Act is so important?
Shami Chakrabarti
I think the…..the Human Rights Act is firstly important because it very simply articulates the…..the fundamental rights and freedoms that are essential to democracy.
Mike Semple Piggot
Yeah.
Shami Chakrabarti
And it is our…..our modern British reflection of the, you know, the civil and political rights as you see them in the universal declaration. After…after World War II in particular, and of course in Britain we’re fortunate enough to have had a much longer liberty journey, if you like, we’ve got a much longer tradition of rights and freedoms, but after World War II in particular, something incredibly special happened.
Mike Semple Piggot
Yes.
Shami Chakrabarti
And that is that out of the embers of the Holocaust and the Blitz democratic people from all over the world came together and said what are the non-negotiables that are essential to……to some extent to peace and prosperity, but to the survival of democracy itself, values like no torture, no compromise, free-speech, fair trials, free and fair elections, freedom of thought conscience and religions. Without these…….these principles…ultimately, equal treatment under the law as well in the application of other rights, without these values democracy itself cannot survive. Now in…in Britain we have respected these values, but perhaps not articulated them as well as we should and been a little too complacent about them. The Human Rights Act does not interfere with Parliamentary sovereignty. If a Parliament really wants to it can pass a law that completely abrogates one of those rights and freedoms. But the Human Right Act allows that legislation or that governmental action at least to be challenged in the courts. And therefore it…it does help individual people and vulnerable groups hold, you know, the over-mighty executive or…or any public authority that’s abusing its power. It gives us a shield and gives us a means of holding them to account.
Mike Semple Piggot
Well, the Tories are on record as saying they want to abolish the Human Rights Act, put in place a new Bill of Rights, whatever that means, and we’ll have to wait and see, because their policy isn’t quite distinct as yet.
Shami Chakrabarti
No. Their policy is not quite distinct, to say the least. And I’m afraid that a member….a leading member of the Shadow Cabinet, Mr Clark, Ken Clark, has called the policy “xenophobic legal nonsense”. And I think xenophobic because, of course, all this, you know, wrapping… you know, wrapping human rights up in… in Britishness. You know, we’re very lucky to live in the oldest unbroken democracy on earth, but that doesn’t mean that fundamental rights and freedoms are only extended to British people.
Mike Semple Piggot
Absolutely. If we do abolish the Human Rights Act there are practical problems here. I mean…
Shami Chakrabarti
There are enormous practical problems.
Mike Semple Piggot
…having to come out of Europe.
Shami Chakrabarti
Well….well, exactly. I mean, one of the…. I mean, you know, what’s the beef with the Human Rights Act, what is it that people don’t like about it? Well, proposition number one, you know, governments of whatever persuasion do not actually like being held to account. You know, they say that they understand it’s important, but in practice it’s very irritating to them, so any Bill of Rights is going to be a bit of an irritation to those in power. Proposition number two, there is a confusion about where the Human Rights Act really comes from, and a lot of… because it reflects the European Convention on fundamental rights and freedom some people think this is something to do with Brussels and the European Union and, fundamentally, it is not. This is a creature of the Council of Europe. This is very much Winston Churchill’s post-war mission…
Mike Semple Piggot
Yes, indeed.
Shami Chakrabarti
…that values that he understood had been enduring in Britain for a very long time, needed also to be shared with post-war Europe as a…. as a bulwark against totalitarianism, whether from the Left or the Right. And so…. so people who are Eurosceptics and…. and are…. and don’t want the European Union to become too powerful often mistakenly become instinctively hostile to something quite different, which is the European Convention…
Mike Semple Piggot
Yes.
Shami Chakrabarti
…and the Human Rights Act. But I suppose the ultimate beef that some people on the Left and the Right have with the Human Rights Act is that it does what it says on the tin, it protects human beings, not just British nationals. And, in particular, it means that you cannot send people to a place of torture.
Mike Semple Piggot
No.
Shami Chakrabarti
And I think that for people to have a problem with that, particularly at this moment, when we’ve seen the horrors of what can happen when you….. when you’re prepared to send people to a place of torture, you know…
Mike Semple Piggot
Absolutely.
Shami Chakrabarti
During the war on terror it was called extraordinary rendition, and a lot of leading Conservatives, including Mr Cameron and Mr Hague, have said how wrong that is. It would be nonsensical, indeed, to now change our law in Britain to…..to sanction that kind of behaviour.
Mike Semple Piggot
I think that’s absolutely right. Let’s take a few illustrations. Where do we start, there are so many? We have the 42 day extension proposal - that was defeated, we’ve had the extension recently in the Proceeds of Crime Act to local authorities, which has got quite a lot of ramifications. We’ve got the secret inquests, which was only earlier in the week, or the tail end of last week. We’ve got the increasing use of super injunctions in privacy law, restricting freedom of speech. Can you give me a few illustrations of what Liberty does, and how Liberty has approached these very important issues?
Shami Chakrabarti
Well, I think 42 days, if….if you don’t mind me being sort of proud of my colleagues and proud of my members..
Mike Semple Piggot
No problem at all.
Shami Chakrabarti
..I believe that Liberty was at the very heart of the ultimately successful campaign to defeat that proposal. We are a membership organisation with only 25 staff and an annual turnover of £1.5 million a year, but our “charge or release” campaign against the extension to 42 days is one of the proudest moments in our history, and we…and we won that argument because we… not just because we knew that such an extension would be unfair and unjust, but because we demonstrated to a number of different audiences that it was also unnecessary and counter-productive. And we had comparative research from all over the world that demonstrated how long this really is, and how out of step 42 days, or even the current 28 day period is..
Mike Semple Piggot
Yeah.
Shami Chakrabarti
How out of step it is with other democracies. We had a range of alternative policy proposals to show how you can help the police and prosecutors to bring terrorists to justice without abrogating the rule of law. And, in a sense, it’s quite a good illustration of how Liberty does its work. We are a team of…. a multi-disciplinary team of professional human rights campaigners, and we do our campaigning in the courts by bringing cases…
Mike Semple Piggot
Yes.
Shami Chakrabarti
..and intervening in cases. We do our campaigning in the media by way of, you know, briefing journalists and appearing in the media and writing articles and so on. We do our campaigning in Westminster and Whitehall by briefing Parliamentarians and lobbying ministers and so on. And, again, the 42 day campaign was a….was a very good illustration of how, you know, small things can make a big difference. We met with dozens of Labour MPs, one-on-one, two-on-one, myself and colleagues did this, just to set out the argument. Because, ultimately, Liberty is not a powerful organisation in terms of wealth or…or formal governmental power, but we have the power of our… of our values and of our arguments.
Mike Semple Piggot
And influence. You do also have the power of influence. And I mean you yourself have done a fair bit by appearing on the media to promote the interests, and this is how you’re getting your message across?
Shami Chakrabarti
I would say that any influence that we have comes ultimately from our values, and from…..and from the power of reasoned argument.
Mike Semple Piggot
Yes, yes, I wouldn’t dispute that. Let’s focus in on another of these issues. I mean we’ve seen how local authorities have abused RIPA powers. We’ve now got an extension on the Proceeds of Crime Act, two local authorities. I mean, is this right?
Shami Chakrabarti
It certainly isn’t. We’ve got… I think we’ve got two different phenomena that are operating here, one is lazy legislation and over broad powers that….that are passed in the name of terrorism and serious crime. I remember what Jack Straw said to Parliament when the RIPA legislation was going through, he was talking about intrusive powers being used to fight terrorism, paedophilia, organised crime, and now those powers have been used by local authorities to police school catchment areas and deal with dog fouling and so on. And that is possible because the legislators were sloppy and they drafted powers too broadly. The second….the second phenomenon is of what I call constitutional cross-dressing.
Mike Semple Piggot
Right, what’s that?
Shami Chakrabarti
Where everybody wants to be something else, where….where local authority officials now want to be James Bond or want to be….you know, want to be police officers or want to be spies. Where, you know, politicians want to interfere in individual policing operations. And… and in the past, I’m afraid, in the context of some former senior police officers they’ve wanted to enter in to politics. And I think these… these two trends need to be halted. On the one hand, legislation has to be subject to much more rigorous scrutiny, needs to be more carefully framed and limited because of this law of unintended consequence.
Mike Semple Piggot
Consequence. Yeah.
Shami Chakrabarti
And… and secondly, we all, to some…. I mean, it’s as bit of a cheek coming from me, isn’t it, you know, the ranting campaigner who will talk about anything..
Mike Semple Piggot
No.
Shami Chakrabarti
But I don’t have… I don’t have formal powers of arrest or powers to… you know, to compel anybody to do anything. And I think that… I think that police officers need to stick to policing and try and stay out of party political debates, I think that local authorities should be local authorities, not attempting to become law enforcement officials or investigators or so on. Crime - crime ought to be investigated by…by the police, and by getting back in to our constitutional boxes and respecting checks and balances, and understanding why we have different roles, we can…. we can do a lot to safeguard our rights and freedoms.
Mike Semple Piggot
Well, I think there’s one immediate difficulty is, of course - Jack Straw was in Parliament the other day saying - I think it was the Coroners and Criminal Justice Provisions, saying why not trust me, there’s no reason not to. And some commentator in the Press, I think it was the Independent, said well, you wouldn’t dare say that out of Parliament, which I thought was quite - quite a wry comment. The difficulty is that this government doesn’t appear to be very good at listening to its own experts. There was a lot of divergent opinion on the 42 day extension, some of it coming from, you know, the security services themselves. We’ve seen recently on the reallocation of…..or reclassification, rather, of cannabis. Do you think the role of an organisation like yours - we’ll come to the judiciary later, is not just simply a pressure group, but holding people more to account?
Shami Chakrabarti
Well, I mean, whatever you call us, you know, call us a human rights campaign, call us a pressure group, call us a campaign group, yes, civil society, if you like, has to play its part in a healthy democracy. We’re not a…. we’re not a formal part of the constitution, but nor are….nor are journalists, but I don’t think you can have a healthy democracy without…without the, you know, the fifth estate and the rigorous scrutiny of journalists as well. The way that…. the way that we hold people to account, the way that we attempt to gain a voice or influence or whatever you…. whatever you call it, is through being clear about our values, which we, by the way, think resonate very strongly with enduring values in this country. When we poll the… the British electorate, as we regularly do, on their attitude to.. not of the Human Rights Act as a package, which has been so denigrated and there’s never been any decent public information about, but on the component parts of it, no torture, free speech and so on, you find that 87 to 97% of people in this country enthusiastically endorse each of those… each of those rights and freedoms. So we have that framework.
Mike Semple Piggot
Yeah.
Shami Chakrabarti
And we feel it resonates very strongly with people. And then we focus on areas that we think are particularly concerning, ways in which rights and freedoms are being abused, and we make….we make our reasoned argument.
Mike Semple Piggot
Yes. Well, we saw the interest in this country with the Convention on Modern Liberty. You had your 75th birthday recently, anniversary of Liberty. There’s a lot of interest, and we saw how the news is getting out to a much wider audience through Twitter and other social media. Let’s turn to the role of the judiciary. We’ve certainly seen the judiciary in recent years taking a much more robust line with the government and executives than perhaps 20 or 30 years ago. What are your thoughts on this?
Shami Chakrabarti
Well, it’s…..it’s interesting. I mean, you could have a.. you could have a whole hour’s debate at least…
Mike Semple Piggot
I agree.
Shami Chakrabarti
..on whether it’s the judges who have been somehow more robust or, some would say, activist, or whether it’s actually at the executive has just gone so far that the…. that the judges had no choice but to hold the line on enduring values. And.. and I think it may actually be the truth may be closer to the latter than the former. I don’t accept that we’ve seen a particularly activist or interventionist judiciary in the way that critics of the judiciary like to present. I think that… that our senior judges… I mean, of course, I don’t agree with some of their decisions, and I will wholeheartedly celebrate others, but looking at… looking at the performance in the round, looking at those big decisions that have come out of the House of Lords, which has now, of course, become the Supreme Court, I think you can look at them, particularly I have to say, you know, under the… under the leadership and co-ordination of…of Lord Bingham. I think what you see is really a pretty first-rate Supreme Court that can… that provide… probably provides leadership even amongst Supreme Courts in all over the world, and doing incredibly difficult work with great…. with great independence and great intellectual precision in very difficult times.
Mike Semple Piggot
Yes.
Shami Chakrabarti
Because let’s be clear, you know, nobody is…..nobody is trivialising threats from terrorism.
Mike Semple Piggot
Absolutely not.
Shami Chakrabarti
Or… or other.. you know, other challenges to our safety and security. You know, the debate is how best to respond, and the debate, ultimately, is about whether we should sacrifice enduring democratic values in the face of this threat or that threat, and I think that the judges have been really in the round, top rate at just dealing with these challenges and holding the line, protecting their independence, but being balanced and fair.
Mike Semple Piggot
We’ve got a new Supreme Court, not everyone took the decision favourably to move from the House of Lords to the Middlesex Guild Hall, or the New Supreme Court as it now is, and not just a question of concept, they didn’t really want to leave the comfort zone of the House of Lords, some members of the House, I understand. What do you think? Do you think it’s a good move?
Shami Chakrabarti
I have to say, I don’t have incredibly strong views about this. I think… I think we won’t really be able to… to evaluate this for some time. I think to some extent the idea was that this should be symbolic, that the separation between the judiciary and the… and the elected limbs of the constitution shouldn’t just be…. shouldn’t just be constitutional, it should be physical and geographical as well, so they should be a few feet over the road and in their own building. And I.. and I understand that, you know, that things like that can over time acquire a symbolic, iconic status and, you know, as children… as schoolchildren grow up and visit the Supreme Court and see that it’s quite obviously something distinct from just a committee room over the road in Parliament. But I think only time will tell. I think that they have been in a Supreme Court. I think if you talk to judges in other parts of the world, as I have, they’ve taken great leadership and inspiration from, you know, things like the Belmarsh decision, that cannot have been easy, to say the least. And… and obviously that was a hotly contested decision about whether it’s okay to lock up foreign nationals suspected of involvement, loosely defined in terrorism indefinitely. You know, and… you know, straight after 9/11 when people were understandably fearful for… for security, in a very hotly politicised context where you’ve got Prime Ministers and Home Secretaries really almost baiting the judiciary in their… in their rhetoric and so on, it can’t have been easy. And what they produced was really a sort of first rate human rights analysis. And I suppose speaking to the lawyers who will be listening to this - I hope that lawyers and non-lawyers will be listening to this.
Mike Semple Piggot
I imagine both.
Shami Chakrabarti
But in particular, to young people who are thinking about careers and whether a career in the law is ultimately worthwhile, I think that the last few years have been very challenging times for the rule of law and for fundamental rights and freedoms, but they have also, I think, produced for young people, looking back, the greatest inspiration of how important the rule of law is in a democracy, and what lawyers and, ultimately, judges can do, you know, to keep that democracy alive.
Mike Semple Piggot
We have got, inevitably, a lot of students who are likely to listen to this. You’ve been a practising lawyer, you worked with the Home Office, you’ve had exposure for many years now to quite complex issues. What would your advice be to a young lawyer who’s interested in human rights and civil liberties?
Shami Chakrabarti
I would say that it is very easy to say, you know, what kind of law am I going to do, I’m going to be a human rights lawyer. I would say… I would remind people that… that human rights law lives in all sorts of other areas of the law.
Mike Semple Piggot
Yeah.
Shami Chakrabarti
You know, criminal lawyers are human rights lawyers, immigration and asylum lawyers are human rights lawyers, housing lawyers are human rights lawyers and, you know, there are increasingly important human rights issues that will arise in regulatory practice, in…. in, as you say, the law of libel, all sorts of areas.
Mike Semple Piggot
Yes.
Shami Chakrabarti
So don’t see human rights practices as something distinct or separate or…
Mike Semple Piggot
It’s pervasive. Yes.
Shami Chakrabarti
It’s pervasive. And I think that a lot - I would say the majority of people who come in to the law come in to the law because they do recognise that the individual needs to be respected and protected even in the context of wider society, and because they believe in fairness and due… and due process. So I think they’re often instinctively sympathetic to… to human rights values. But I would say don’t be too prescriptive about the area in which you will apply human rights principles, don’t be too prescriptive about which area of the law you will eventually…
Mike Semple Piggot
Yes, I think that’s very wise advice.
Shami Chakrabarti
…you will eventually practice in.
Mike Semple Piggot
Let me end with one question - some said that we’ve seen a gradual erosion of civil liberties over the last 10, 12 years, making a political point, obviously, but do you think we’ve reached the bottom yet, are we likely to go down through the curve and go forward?
Shami Chakrabarti
I am actually sort of sitting here with you in, you know, November 2009, feeling really quite optimistic, and that’s… and that’s not a party political point because, by the way, the slide began under the... under the previous government.
Mike Semple Piggot
Yes, it did.
Shami Chakrabarti
I would say - I personally take it back to something like the early to mid-90s, some would take it back even further. I think it’s…. I think the real catalyst was two great political pugilists who sort of shadowed each other at the… at the Home Office despatch box, and they were Michael Howard and the young ambitious Tony Blair, and they decided to play politics with Home Affairs, and I think that was… that was a moment of real… of real danger, as we saw subsequently. But, you know, hawks and doves everywhere, it’s whoever you vote for the government gets in. However, I think that the worm is turning. I think that these concerns and these values are now better understood and articulated by non-lawyers. You know, one of the reasons why I wanted to come and work at Liberty and ultimately why I was, you know, ridiculously audacious enough to apply for this job was that I wanted to have a go at being a lawyer who could speak plain English, I wanted to attempt to unlock the language and the… and the mystique of the law and try and explain its value to people who didn’t have a law degree. And I think that whether I was successful or not at that is not the point. The point is that the issues and the period that we’ve lived in have now given us experience to a much wider concern, and I think people have woken up. I think people are not as complacent about their rights and freedoms in 2009 as they were 10 years ago.
Mike Semple Piggot
Yes, that’s right.
Shami Chakrabarti
And once you’re woken from your complacency you start treasuring your rights and freedoms a bit better, and I think that is where the more progressive conversation begins.
Mike Semple Piggot
Well, fortunately, there are a lot of people taking much more interest now because of these conventions and the publicity you give. We’ve also got a lot of libertarian, with a small l, in terms of blogging and other social media and the word’s getting out, so it’s not just the province of a few professionals, it’s the right of everyone to take an interest and comment.
Shami Chakrabarti
And, of course, I would encourage anyone who does… who does care about these issues in particular to join Liberty, the National Council for Civil Liberties, where they will be in a very good company.
Mike Semple Piggot
Absolutely. Well, Shami, thanks very much indeed. That was a most enjoyable podcast to do. Thank you.
Shami Chakrabarti
Thank you very much.
