Catholics have often made common cause with the promoters of human rights. And with good reason: as Leo XIII argued in Rerum Novarum (1891), we cannot condone cruelty, neglect or baseless discrimination directed at anyone if we profess the idea that we are all equally made in God’s image, and that mistreatment of any one of us is mistreatment of our Saviour himself.
Human rights are one thing. The European Convention on Human Rights is another. Increasingly, rights under this Convention are becoming not so much secular reflections of sound doctrine, as flat contradictions of it. This has been happening for some time, but a trio of recent court decisions in Britain has made it clear that the faithful may have to consider very carefully how far they can in conscience continue to support it.
