Human rights chief faces up to post-Brexit challenges

“There was clearly a degree of support for groups like UKIP, and people not feeling engaged or part of Europe.”

Walking away is not something she’d have chosen to do, she adds. “for all its faults- significant faults – the collaboration and relationship between governments at that level is something we’d welcome.” But she understands the concerns, particularly from people and communities for whom the economic outlook is poor.

As the second chair of the Scottish Human Rights Commission – she took over from Professor Alan Miller earlier this year – Ms Robertson has a key interest and a responsibility to promote awareness of and respect for human rights.

There are similarities between the suspicion many people have for the European Union the scepticism about treaties like the European Convention on Human Rights. Both are seen as remote, detached from the concerns of ordinary people.

The biggest task Robertson has, it seems to me, is to communicate the real benefits of human rights to the man in the street. She’s well placed to do so.

It’s a vexed topic, which can seem at the same time too dry and technical for many people to connect with, while lending itself to simplistic and misleading interpretations, which have led to hostility.

But Robertson, the former head of Oxfam Scotland and ex-director of See Me, the campaign to end mental health stigma, has plenty of experience of communicating such issues.

She has the kind of plain speaking approach necessary to counter the myths about human rights, such as the perception that they help migrants avoid deportation and claim benefits (©Daily Express) or have enabled prisoners to demand gay porn and heroin (Richard Littlejohn made the claim in the Daily Mail without qualification – the paper later apologised for the ‘joke’).

Public cynicism about human rights is fed by such stories, but Robertson says it is not true that they seldom benefit ordinary people. She highlights the example of the Hillsborough families – arguing that human rights laws were a significant factor in enabling them to finally establish the truth about police actions and errors.

“It was the same in Rotherham, with the young girls whose rights to a childhood, to be safe and supported and looked after were completely destroyed.”

Talk of developing a ‘human rights culture’ in Scotland is meaningless to most people, I suggest. She responds: “I was asked about that a lot when I was at See Me. Fundamentally what it means is that people have autonomy, and the chance to contribute to decision making that affects their lives – rather than government structures deciding what is good for people.

“At times we are a long way from that. At Oxfam I could see how the lived experience of people in poverty was far from achieving that autonomy in reality.”

Here in Scotland, we’ve come a long way in some areas, such as care, she says. Government, councils, charities, health boards, all declare they work on a rights-respecting model. But practices on the ground don’t always deliver on the principles set out in laws and guidelines.

“People have their rights breached all the time. That could be as basic as making a decision about someone’s care without consulting them. It sounds heavy-handed, talking about their rights being breached, but that’s the reality.

“In some cases we do it appallingly. The UK government could have genuinely consulted with disabled people or those who have experienced poverty, about welfare reform and how the system could genuinely support people into employment.”

Instead decisions were taken based on a prejudice that poverty is driven by lifestyle choices, she says. “Was the intent to help people access their rights? Or to cut budgets?”

The concept of rights can be a real help to people, Robertson argues. “My experience at See Me, as we started to introduce people to the language of rights is that they started to use it in real situations.”

People who are in mental health crisis can be at their most vulnerable, she says. “It gives people strength to know, ‘this is my right, I can ask for this. It isn’t just me – this is something afforded me by an international convention’.

“That sounds grandiose but I’ve seen people have that conversation and it has changed the dynamic in a room. The more people understand their rights, the more that will happen.”

Under her predecessor Alan Miller, there has been considerable progress. Scotland has a Child Abuse Inquiry – albeit this has been in the news of late with a spate of resignations – which the SHRC has been significantly involved in establishing.

Professor Miller launched the Scottish National Action Plan on Human Rights, SNAP, which is endorsed by the Scottish Government. Nicola Sturgeon has committed to looking at how the European Convention on Economic and Cultural Rights can be incorporated into Scottish law.

But given the difficulty of establishing some of these rights in practice, does she think we often just pay lip service to observing the rights of minority groups? “I think that’s sometimes true,” she says.

The answer, she adds, is stronger rules and accountability for public bodies. “We simply have to be responsible enough to hold ourselves to account as a society for what goes wrong, it needs to be built in.”

She’s been around long enough, she says, to observe the way Government introduces laws that are strong, but subsequently weaken the bit which allows it to be enforced, or holds people accountable. “If people know they are going to be accountable, they try harder to get it right. That doesn’t have to equal scapegoating people. If things go wrong and your choice is between denial or being sacked, that doesn’t seem like a reasonable operating choice. It needs to be proportionate. #

She mentions the failure of a number of agencies to investigate the abuse of vulnerable girls in Rotherham again: “How do we pay attention to what people say, investigate and be prepared to gather the evidence to find out what is truly going on?”

After a low key start, much of her tenure as chair seems likely to be concerned with recent political upheavals and what they might mean for human rights.

Pulling out of Europe shouldn’t mean a loss of much of the progress made under the European Convention of Human Rights. Many key rights are now enshrined in UK law –meaning they could be repealed but simply pulling out of Europe won’t invalidate them.

But of equal concern is the Conservative manifesto pledge to scrap the human rights act, and human rights activists have spent the last few days studying the record of the new cabinet to work out the stances members have taken on the issue.

There have been discussions about the complexities of possible repeal in devolved nations, with the HRA’s provisions forming part of the Scotland Act and tied in even more closely to the Good Friday Agreement. “Certainly we don’t want it repealed, “ Robertson says. “The Human Rights Act is supported by the Scottish Government and the parliament, and by civil society as well.”

Theresa May herself has a remarkably chequered record on this issue, having flip-flopped several times in the run up to the EU referendum and subsequent Tory leadership contention.

She notoriously warned human rights had reached a point where “we all know the stories” citing what later turned out to be a highly distorted media tale of an illegal immigrant who couldn’t be deported because he had a pet cat.

As recently as April she was arguing that the UK should remain in the EU but leave the European Convention on Human Rights.

But when she announced her intention to seek leadership of the Tory party she retreated somewhat “The reality is there will be no Parliamentary majority for pulling out of the ECHR, so that is something I’m not going to pursue,” she said.

That’s a conversion Judith Robertson welcomes. “Theresa May has stepped back. It no longer looks as if we are talking about a full-scale abandonment of the rights framework.”

But there will be a continued need for vigilance. At bottom the goal is pretty simple: She and the UK’s other human rights commissioners will continue to expect the UK Government and the Scottish government alike to continue the progressive realisation of human rights, she says.

“We need that, particularly for people who are left behind, those at the bottom who are not managing to benefit from the economic models we operate under.

“We need to address the right to a decent standard of living, in a context of widespread inequality. That applies to the Scottish Government as much as Westminster.”

Read more: The Life and Loves of Judith Robertson