The human rights lawyer who is now the UK Prime Minister made his maiden speech in the House of Commons on 28 May 2015. In it, Keir Starmer praised the Labour government’s enactment of the Human Rights Act (1998), referring back to Magna Carta and noting that “the whole point of human rights is that they apply universally to all people everywhere”.
But what exactly are human rights and how ought Catholics to think about them? Because there certainly seems to be a tension between a Catholic conception of natural law and natural rights, and those “rights of man” of the French Declaration of 1789 that Edmund Burke criticised as a “digest of anarchy”.
