We only have the rights that governments give us.

A father may punish his child with a smack, and there is rarely anything to stop him. Or is there? In Britain, advocates of the “nanny state” have sought to make it unlawful for parents to physically punish their children. If a father punishes his child the State could find out, or years later the child, now grown and claiming “abuse,” could cooperate with the State in prosecuting him. (An incentive exists because on successful conviction the “victim” becomes eligible for a payment under the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme.) Or once the child has come of age, he or she could sue the parent directly for compensation. This the child could quite conceivably do, once the State has deemed physical punishment of children an unlawful act.

Here is an example of how a government can encroach on the most fundamental instinctive behaviour of man, while doubtless believing itself to be acting in furtherance of “human rights.” The advocates of making smacking children unlawful, Britain’s four Children’s Commissioners, said in January 2006 that they “have been urged by the United Nations and the Council of Europe to ban all forms of corporal punishment against children.” It was reported that “Campaigners for a ban insist both from a moral point of view, and because of increasingly strict human rights legislation from Europe, smacking children has to be outlawed.”

The scenario of parents being dragged through the courts years later by their children may seem implausible, but consider that there have been a number of cases of successful prosecutions in Britain of individuals who had committed their crimes around twenty years previously, when social attitudes to those crimes were considerably different. These were mainly cases involving sex with minors, with the 1970s entertainer/songwriter Jonathan King’s case being typical. In common with prosecutions of nationalists, the State is unlikely to face criticism from the media for, as in King’s case, relying on the testimony of participants in events which took place 20 or 30 years previously. Since King is Jewish we are certain to hear all about his particular plight, but many other, similar prosecutions have been brought with little or no publicity.

Trials have been moved from the place where the offence was committed, as is traditional, to somewhere else, usually of the prosecution’s choosing. This has occurred in the trial of the Libyan, Abdel al-Megrahi, convicted of the sabotage of Flight 103 over Lockerbie, and in the trials of several British nationalists. For years, due to this supposedly invariable rule, unfortunates caught with a small quantity of cannabis while travelling have been hauled before a magistrate deep in the English countryside who believed that any drug offence warranted six months in jail. For this same offence a city copper would look the other way, especially if he was in a good mood.

In Austria in February 2006, Irving was imprisoned for a speech he made in 1989. Here we have the double travesty of his being criminalised not only for words uttered, but prosecuted 17 years after the event, a prosecution which ordinarily would only have been undertaken for a serious crime such as murder.

Few will appreciate the legal subtleties of these cases. Many ordinary people, with little knowledge of legal matters, are unclear even about the distinction between civil and criminal law. There is likely to arise a vague uneasiness however, with a growing awareness in the collective unconscious of the tyranny that is creeping up. A prosecution which takes place many years after the event, by which time the public perception of the gravity of that offence has changed entirely, is a de facto imposition of retroactive law.

The consistent trend has been to make it easier for the British State to imprison a dissenter. One milestone was the 1967 relaxing of the requirement for a unanimous guilty verdict by a jury.

If these new legal practices are not actually unconstitutional and unlawful, they are certainly unprecedented. Although my focus is chiefly on British matters, a comparable situation exists in America. David Lane was tried repeatedly until a successful conviction was obtained; Matt Hale was entrapped by a federal agent; Zundel and Rudolf were whisked away on flimsy claims of “immigration violations.”

In a civil dispute, i.e. a financial but not criminal matter, the dispute is heard and decided by a higher authority. The litigants go to a court, and that court has powers to enforce its judgement. A person or company is ordered to pay money, and if they refuse, bailliffs can be sent in, or other remedies can be applied.

As Robert Frenz said, rules, rights or laws are as nothing without the power to punish. Without the capacity to enforce them by raising the cost of transgression, they might as well not exist. We can certainly have civil rights, because there exists a civil authority, a higher power, to grant and enforce them.

For so-called human rights, there is no higher authority. The only thing higher than man is Nature, which enforces its laws inexorably but doesn’t issue commandments, and God. The concept of “human rights” is a religious expression. It derives, as R. P. Oliver and others have pointed out, from the New Testament universalist concept that “all are equal under God.”

The object is to get ordinary people used to the idea of supra-national governance, using high-sounding, idealistic phrases (such as “the right to freedom of expression”) as enticement. Such calls appeal to man’s religious nature, the desire for something higher and better than himself. Applying Britain’s constitution, laws of long standing, advocating European governance for Britain is treason.

These are the facts of the matter, the reality of it. A universal law must be universally acknowledged, and enforced by a power whose authority is beyond question. Otherwise the law is merely an imposition of opinion, philosophy, ideals or faith, which can be bent any which way to suit the requirements and dogmas of the moment. Without the power to enforce, or punish deviation, high-sounding ideals are just so much cant.

Suppose a nationalist, in trouble for distributing a tactless leaflet and charged with breaking some lately made up law, tried to apply the oft-quoted “right to freedom of expression” to his cause. Under human rights legislation the Pakistani or Mexican whose feelings he is deemed to have offended has as much claim to the land as he, and is judicially precisely the equal of the man whose family has tilled that land for generations. Another “right” will be quickly brought forth from the legal bag of tricks, which he has probably contravened, which is certainly more essential to the underlying chimera of global equality and harmony.

The State has imported and encouraged whole legions of the “professionally offended” who have a vested interest in claiming “harassment, alarm or distress,” or that their “rights are being denied” by any statement of fact or opinion which is contrary to their interests. The whole edifice is corrupt.

To invoke a universal brotherhood sharing common rights requires a power higher than man, or a God of man’s own making. A court of the new world order in fact, a supreme court with the ability to impose its ideology on every single individual on the planet. In Thomas More’s Utopia, the vision was of a bland, ultimately boring society in which nothing much ever happened. The utopia promised by the new “human rights” religionists will be a different beast altogether, and truly a nightmare.