Do you think it’s time to revive the idea of gassing the Jews? Our Home Secretary and Justice Secretary certainly do. That’s why they advocate Britain’s departure from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
Such is the learned judgement of Prof. François Crépeau, UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants. Who am I to argue?
Prof. Crépeau’s list of degrees is longer than mine, and he has been blessed by the laying on of UN hands. Hence he knows how to argue by sticking the thin end of a wedge in and twisting it for maximum effect.
Here’s a sample of his profound thought: “We have to remember the 1930s and how the rights of the Jews were restricted in Germany and then the rights of the whole German people. I mean, countries that go down the path of reducing the rights of one category of people usually don’t stop there.”
They certainly don’t. They go on to build gas chambers and burn corpses in concentration-camp crematoriums. And this, according to Prof. Crépeau, is exactly the slippery slope on which Britain would step – unwittingly or otherwise – if she were to withdraw from the ECHR.
Can you find any flaw in the good professor’s sequential thought? I can’t. It makes perfect sense, at least in some quarters. Such as the UN, the EU, the European Court and your friendly local loony bin.
However, this side of those venerable institutions such moronic, hysterical animadversions are pure Crépeau. One wonders what they teach at McGill and University of Paris, where this savant learned his rhetoric, logic and international law. Do they demand basic literacy before issuing advanced degrees?
The ECHR isn’t about human or any other rights. It’s about transferring legal authority from individual nations to the foul abortion known as the EU, thereby increasing its power and eventually making its supremacy irreversible. C’est tout, as they say at the University of Paris.
It takes a late stage of mental retardation to equate human rights with various international charters bearing that name. Being a UN trouble-shooter, my friend François ought to ponder the fact that the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights was signed by such authorities on the subject as Stalin’s Russia.
The EU, along with all the stillborn embryos of its offshoots, isn’t really a European Union. In all but a few technicalities it’s a union between Germany and France.
I hope my French friends, of whom I have many, and German friends, of whom I have none, won’t be offended, but England has nothing to learn about law in general and human rights in particular from either nation.
In my parents’ lifetime, the Germans committed, and the French abetted, the very atrocities that excite François so. Their Eastern European hangers-on were also active perpetrators then, and for the next 50 years or so they continued the fine tradition of concentration camps, this time with a red rather than brown tint.
This isn’t to say that those places haven’t redeemed themselves since then. It’s just that their conversion to the side of the angels is too recent to give them the right to impose their twisted notions of international legality on a country where individual rights have been protected by law for at least a millennium.
Even without resorting to François’s own demagogic trick of dragging the Holocaust in, thereby vulgarising one of the greatest tragedies in history, only an ideologised ignoramus would fail to observe that, at practically any moment in the last several centuries, it’s England that has been in a position to teach the continentals the basics of individual rights, not the other way around.
Repealing the ECHR would mean repatriating the enforcement of human rights to the country where they have traditionally been secure, and away from a legally and morally pernicious supranational organisation within which the Vichy-like Franco-German alliance would subjugate Europe – this time including Britain.
Anyway, François needn’t have bothered his intellectually challenged head with such matters. Dave has just ridden roughshod over our Justice and Home Secretaries by ruling out the very withdrawal that gives my friend François nightmares of gas chambers.
“Withdrawal is not going to happen,” says a Downing Street source. “David Cameron is clear this is off the table… The British bill of rights could mitigate the worst excesses of the Human Rights Act but it won’t change the fundamentals.”
The most important fundamental Dave cherishes is that Britain must become, by hook or by crook, a gau in the Fourth Reich, otherwise known as the EU. Perhaps François Crépeau should apply for the job of gauleiter. He has all the credentials: stupidity, ignorance, immorality and – most important – the talent to express himself at a hysterical pitch.