Leading expert ‘frightened’ by threats to European human rights framework

The undermining of Europe’s post-war human rights framework is “frightening”, the head of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights told a meeting hosted by the Institute of International and European Affairs in Dublin.

Professor Michael O’Flaherty, an acclaimed human rights expert from Co Galway who has headed the EU agency since December 2015, yesterday delivered an address titled “Is Europe Facing a Human Rights Crisis?”.

He praised the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948 and held up the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, adopted in 2009, as evidence that the trend was not overwhelmingly negative.

However, Professor O’Flaherty raised concerns that the boundaries of acceptability had shifted in recent years and voiced concerns about inequality, hate crime, surveillance and the migrant crisis.

He said he was most frightened by the “many influential voices in many parts of European Union society that are challenging the very fundamentals of human rights, rejecting it as a framework for governance and for society”.

Pointing to statements by US presidential candidate Donald Trump that he said would have been “unthinkable” fifteen to twenty years ago, he said there was a “rejection of the very system itself out there in the discourse that I haven’t seen before”.

He also said the human rights framework was not only being rejected by those seen as “the ‘bad guys’” but that there was “increasingly a rejection by people who are committed to building strong and good societies who are no longer persuaded that human rights approaches are the ones that will bring the best outcomes”.

Concluding, he called on the human rights community to help “restore human rights to being the respected space and framing of which it used to be as we struggle to solve some of society’s greatest challenges”.