Rights and wrong, wrong, wrongs

Here’s something we don’t want.

A Government whose senior figures are hazy about human rights.

When Bill English said ‘‘it’s clearly not the case that some New Zealanders have less human rights than others’’ it wasn’t half as clear as it should have been.

Not after his deputy Paula Bennett had muddied things mightily by saying there are different standards for people who leave a string of victims behind them.

We’re not being dainty here. She’s describing gang members with bad criminal records, and illegal firearms, selling methamphetamine.

These would be poisonous scumbags and we all know that.

When we catch and convict them their civil freedoms (not the same thing as human rights) are rightly yankable.

For instance, your freedom to move around your society as you wish gets suspended if you’ve been jailed, pal.

We must be as adept as possible in our efforts to hunt out their illegal behaviour but some things cannot be swept aside in pursuit of that worthwhile end. And the single most important constraint is the very one that Bennett misplaced.

We cannot create a subset of people who, under law, are less human than the rest of us.

Lots of people will have not the slightest problem regarding these guys as sub-human and Bennett suggests, explicitly, that our definitions of human rights can be ‘‘stretched’’ in their case.

Human rights, pretty much by definition, aren’t that elastic.

If we treat them as such we are lying to the rest of the world when we sign those high-minded declarations about human rights being inalienable.

If history has taught us anything it’s that fighting horrible behaviour with horrible behaviour tends to lead to more, not less, horrible behaviour all around.

English now says the proposed search powers do not erode human rights, but that Parliament will, in any case, consider the changes in that context.

Few would disagree that if police had, as he puts it, ‘‘really good reason’’ to suspect that people with a record of serious crime were distributing meth and holding unlicensed firearms, police needed powers to be able to ‘‘get in there’’. If they don’t have sufficient powers already – are we sure whether that’s a given? – then we need to be agreed about the legitimacy of any move to lower the bar in terms of evidence required to constitute those really good reasons.

For that to happen, lawmakers need to test their bright ideas against human rights. Not vice versa.