Britain’s Attacks on Rights

Banning books is usually associated with the petty tyrants of the Soviet Bloc and the Third World, but these days the British government finds itself in the headlines for its attempts to dictate what its subjects may read. British authorities have banned the distribution of Harper’s Magazine because it contains excerpts from “Inside Intelligence,” the memoirs of Anthony Cavendish, a former British intelligence agent. Court injunctions and the threat of contempt citations have blocked the publication of Cavendish’s book in Britain as well as news accounts of its revelations.

British authorities insist that they moved against Harper’s only because Cavendish, by publishing his memoirs, violated the lifelong obligation of confidentiality imposed on all intelligence agents. That was the same justification used by the government in its ultimately futile effort to block the distribution within the United Kingdom of “Spycatcher,” the memoirs of another former British agent, Peter Wright. But skeptics wonder if the government of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was simply miffed at both ex-agents because they candidly discussed the efforts of the British intelligence service to harass members of the opposition Labor Party, to discredit former Prime Minister Harold Wilson and to blame the agency’s shortcomings on the alleged homosexuality of its late director, Sir Maurice Oldfield.

Suspicions about Thatcher’s real motives are fed by her party’s increasing disregard for civil rights and civil liberties. Shortly after the Harper’s incident, her government introduced legislation to amend the 1911 Official Secrets Act by making unauthorized disclosure of information by an intelligence agent a criminal offense punishable by up to two years in prison; all legal defenses, like a desire to blow the whistle on official wrongdoing, would be eliminated. The government contends that the amendments are less stringent than the Official Secrets Act because, for the first time, the harm done by the disclosures would be taken into account. This is pure tokenism, however: Prosecutors would not have to show how a specific revelation harmed the public interest, only that the information falls into a category whose disclosure is presumed harmful.

The Conservatives’ overwhelming margin in the House of Commons virtually guarantees the passage of any bill that Thatcher submits. So, these days, the only effective check on her authority may be the European Court of Human Rights. Just recently the court ruled that a British law allowing suspected terrorists to be held for up to seven days without a court appearance violates the European Convention on Human Rights. This means that the Thatcher government can either amend the 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act, the centerpiece of its current campaign against the Irish Republican Army, or ignore the court’s ruling, thus risking international censure.

Since the founding of the European Court of Human Rights 28 years ago, Britain has been brought before its judges 30 times--more than any other nation in the Council of Europe--and has lost 21 cases. That history, plus the latest government actions, has inspired a campaign by a group of leading British intellectuals, jurists and artists for a written Bill of Rights to counter what they describe as “the intensification of authoritarian rule in the United Kingdom.” The campaign, Charter 88, says that Britain’s so-called “unwritten constitution” of legal precedents and uncodified procedures offers little protection against a ruthless government, Tory or Labor.

Charter 88 received its most fervent message of support from the organization on which it modeled itself--Charter 77, the human-rights group that was launched in Czechoslovakia to monitor the 1977 Helsinki Accords. “Like yourselves,” said the statement from Charter 77, “we are convinced that democracy and human rights are connected.” Thatcher often speaks out against human-rights abuses in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, so perhaps the Charter 77 statement will jar her into recognizing rights violations closer to home. It should jar her.