Kinley, David --- "Where hope meets expectation between human rights idealism and pragmatism" [2013] ELECD 1274; in Kinley, David; Sadurski, Wojciech; Walton, Kevin (eds), "Human Rights" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2013) 236

Book Title: Human Rights

Editor(s): Kinley, David; Sadurski, Wojciech; Walton, Kevin

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781781002742

Section: Chapter 11

Section Title: Where hope meets expectation between human rights idealism and pragmatism

Author(s): Kinley, David

Number of pages: 21

Abstract/Description:

As a concept, human rights have application and impact at the levels of both an aspirational ideal and pragmatic implementation. The differences between the two perspectives are evident in rhetoric as well as legal and policy pronouncements, often rubbing along relatively uncontroversially in Western democracies. For many civil and political rights, such as privacy, free speech and freedom of association, there is an unspoken acceptance that on a day-to-day basis, the ideal is tempered by many and various practical necessities, and it is only in times of crisis that the ideal is called upon to reassert or reassess more lofty expectations. The 2011–2012 News International phone-hacking scandal in the United Kingdom illustrates the point. This was indeed a crisis that elicited questions as to what ought to be the balance between rights and responsibilities of the parties involved, including: journalists, media magnates, politicians and the police. And yet despite such a widely cast net and the big fish it caught, it was played out via paroxysms of heated debate over the intermingled boundaries of privacy, news media and the public interest, and not by way of the paralysis of an overreaction in favour of one particular right over another. This however is not always the result of such rights clashes, as the modern history of anti-terrorist laws worldwide, both before but especially after 9/11, bears testimony, in its purported preference for security over personal freedom.