EUROPEAN ASSEMBLY’S DEBATE ON HUMAN RIGHTS

Grey River Argus, 22 August 1949, Page 5

EUROPEAN ASSEMBLY’S DEBATE ON HUMAN RIGHTS

BRITISH VIEW PARIS, August 20. Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, who, at Nuremberg, was Britain’s prosecutor, asked the 12 nations of the Council of Europe to surrender the ‘’‘sovereign right to suppress liberty and democratic institutions.” He was backing the resolution on Luman rights put before the Council’s Consultative Assembly, by Mr Winston Churchill. He said that there must be a binding convention on Human rights. “From the world point of view we cannot let the matter of human rights rest at a declaration of moral principles and pious aspirations,” he declared. The European Movement resolution called upon the European Assembly to get a preliminary convention from the member nations that they would enforce fundamental freedoms and rights now protected by their own laws This would be followed by an international convention in which the member nations would agree to a European Bill of Rights and would set up a Human Rights Commission and a Human Rights Court to enforce them. Sir David said the proposed Court would function under a statute modelled on the Charter of the International Court of Justice at The Hague. The function of the commission would be to act as a filter to stop the Court being flooded by unsuitable petitions. He said: — “Our plan provides for a system of collective security against tyranny and oppression. We have seen, to our sorrow, in Czechoslovakia, the retrogressive steps by which a democratic constitution may be overthrown.” Sir David emphasised that the plan involves some voluntary surrender of sovereignty, but he said he did not think that any member State would wish to insist on its sovereign right to suppress liberty and democratic institutions. Another British delegate, Mr J. G. Foster, said: ’We have had totalitarian dictatorships only too recently in Europe, which have disregarded the right of the ordinary man to look forward to free speech, free religion, and freedom from arrest. The concentration camps in the East of Europe are not too far away from us to say that this is simply an academic exercise.”