The best speeches for the defence are clear, persuasive and short. Shami Chakrabarti’s book is quite short, but not always as clear as it could be, and unsuccessful as a work of persuasion. She writes with an obvious passion about the conventions and constitutions that endeavour to put human rights theories into practice:

This is appetite-whetting, although I was momentarily puzzled by ‘the evil fiction of racial supremacy in the air’. What fiction? Biggles?

Of course, the flying ace is nowhere to be found as Chakrabarti leads us through the history of human rights theory before dealing with the various international treaties and conventions that make up ‘our imperfect but vital twenty-first-century human rights inheritance, crafted by the survivors of the Second Great War’.

The history is necessarily brief, though informative and interesting. As she points out, the ‘astonishingly clear’ declarations of universal human rights contained in the US Declaration of Independence and its original Constitution did nothing for slaves (or Native Americans), and the equally clear 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man was followed within a few years by The Terror, administered in large part by the leading human rights lawyer of his day, Maximilien Robespierre.

Stalin’s 1936 USSR Constitution succinctly guaranteed ‘freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, including the holding of mass meetings’ (article 125). Such guarantees were as worthless as the drafting was sparse and lyrical.

Chakrabarti describes the post-war momentum that led to a series of international human rights conventions. Some of these are of huge importance. For example, the 1951 Refugee Convention is ‘a vital part of human rights machinery in providing at least a basic safety net when individual nation states – which bear the lion’s share of responsibility for guaranteeing rights, freedoms and human dignity in their territories – fail in that duty’.

However, all over Europe nationalist parties have been increasing in influence, their success fuelled by resentment towards refugees. A book making the case for the defence of human rights needs to do more than merely explain what the Refugee Convention says and assert that it is a good thing; it needs to persuade an increasingly sceptical public either that it needs to be supported or, if not, how it should be reformed. Chakrabarti’s argument is a single sentence:

No one is going to be persuaded by that.

She turns to the European Convention on Human Rights. Some of what she writes might be helpful to the general reader, but as a defence, it fails once again and the feeling grows that she isn’t really trying. Thus, we read about the case where a baker refused to ice ‘Support Gay Marriage’ onto a gay customer’s cake, but it is skated over so quickly that anyone who doesn’t already know that the baker won, and even many who do, will struggle to follow quite what point this is meant to illustrate.

Chakrabarti devotes a chapter to the human rights response to global warming, and alarmingly quotes the (self-described) eco-authoritarian William Ophuls with apparent approval. In Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity Revisited (WH Freeman & Co Ltd, 1992), Ophuls wrote that ‘liberal democracy as we know it … is doomed by ecological scarcity; we need a completely new political philosophy and set of political institutions’. This seems to have influenced Chakrabarti:

I hope the former director of Liberty is not morphing into an Ophuls eco-authoritarian.