“Nothing, to hide, nothing to fear, right?” Shami Chakrabarti repeats, slowly building up the image of an ever more invasive state, watching everyone’s daily lives “just to check” nothing suspicious is occurring. In this internet age she explains how our location, relationships and the websites we visit can be tracked by those wishing to listen in. Shami continually assets, “you’re ok with that, right?” acknowledging the government’s belief in their right to listen in to ensure our safety. But as her picture of a Big-Brother state emerges it is evident that Shami thinks we should definitely not be “OK” with this blanket surveillance.
Shami Chakrabarti is the director of Liberty, the British civil liberties advocacy organisation, and has campaigned against “excessive” anti-terrorist measures that give governments the power to watch our presence online. Explaining how Liberty formed in 1934 as a reaction against undercover police officers posing as hunger marchers and inciting violence, Shami talks about the organisation’s current concern with government interference, citing Edward Snowden’s revelations about global surveillance programmes. She highlights the lack of democratic debate and checks and balances in government monitoring systems, and warns about how information can be kept in databases with the potential to be brought up and used against individuals in the future without proper context or background. It is clear that Shami is concerned that the benefits gained from the reasonable use of targeted intelligence are being counteracted by this blanket surveillance in which everyone is treated as a suspect. Her arguments are reasonable, measured and logical in a debate that is often wrought with extreme opinions and panicked positions, and it is hard to disagree with her.
As a prominent human rights lawyer, it is unsurprising that Shami moves on to discuss the necessity of preserving the Human Rights Act in Britain. Drawing on the topical issue of censorship on university campuses, she explains the need for the right for freedom of speech and expression, asserting that there is no such thing as “no platform” in an internet age. She instead argues for counter speech as the most effective means of combatting against the misguided and again, whilst her beliefs may not always be practical (especially in communities which are entrenched in potentially violent ideology) Shami presents a convincing case.
Listing the first fourteen human rights acts one by one, Shami explains recent cases involving slavery, torture and arbitrary detention , crimes that seem remote from modern British life, that still need to be fought against on a daily basis to ensure justice.
“Everyone loves their own human rights and those of the people they identify with,” she observes, but “other people’s freedoms seem cheaper until it’s almost too late.” And it is this point which Shami wants to highlight – that although the Human Rights Act may seem irrelevant to us in our broadly democratic, stable society, it isn’t the same everywhere. By removing or rewriting the act without democratic consultation we effectively remove our rights, with no legislative body existing to support us, and could end up in a situation where these human rights abuses become more common. For this reason Shami copies the entirety of the Human Rights Act in her book, On Liberty, in the hope that people will read through and fully understand them to perceive just how crucial they are in upholding our liberty.
