Security, Citizenship and Responsibilities — Debates on a Bill of Rights in the UK

Abstract

The process leading up to the creation of a Bill of Rights is a momentous occasion for any nation. In this chapter (and the next two chapters) I will explore different aspects of this process through an examination of what the government and the Conservative opposition party in the UK intend to use the potential British Bill of Rights for. In many ways, this chapter can be described as an exploration of the tension between what I will call here ‘civic rights’ (or the rights of citizenship) and human rights. Thus this chapter develops, albeit in a very different policy arena, some of the themes already developed in previous chapters, for example, hierarchical thinking with regard to human rights (deciding whose rights come first) and the necessity of ‘strengthening’ the sense of citizenship and articulating the balance between rights and responsibilities in Britain. In addition to these themes, it will be suggested in this chapter that these debates and proposals for a Bill of Rights in the UK are the site for the emergence of a clash between two types of politics: a ‘politics of citizenship’ and a ‘politics of human rights’ in which the ‘dual commitments of liberal democracies, that is, to international human rights and collective self determination’ (Benhabib 2001: 363) are in tension. This tension between the universal and the particular, with regard to civic rights and human rights, is part of what Žižek refers to as ‘the rebirth of the old distinction between human rights and the rights of citizens’ (2002: 95).