The rights stuff

OneWorld UK

By Daniel Nelson

It starts, of course, with the Magna Carta and towards the end of the exhibition there is a quote from Eleanor Roosevelt describing the United Nations’ human rights charter as “the international Magna Carta of all mankind”.

Taking Liberties: the struggle for Britain's freedoms and rights at the British Library picks out a variety of landmarks and trends from the intervening 900 years of struggle.

The exhibition points out that by the 17th century the perceived importance of the Magna Carta had declined, and that its rediscovery stemmed from political tensions between king and subjects. The basis of this new look at an old document was its suggestion that the foundation of English law lay not in royal power but in “common law” - a national heritage of laws, traditions and customs that even the king had to respect.

A key figure in the re-think was Sir Edward Coke, one of the less-known names brought to the fore by this excellent exhibition. His championing of common law and the primacy of the role of the judiciary placed Magna Carta at the heart of the constitution. (Yes, we do have one: it’s just not been written down in a single document. A written constitution was once adopted, in 1653, but didn’t last long.)

Interestingly, another important document – a transcription of the 1647 Putney debates between senior army officers and a group of agitators for radical reform, known as the Levellers – was also forgotten for a period, until its rediscovery in a library in the late 19th century.

The exhibition covers a huge amount of ground, looking at what happened when the concept of rights was extended from “free men” to religion, slavery (the challenge to the right to hold people as property was the first mass humanitarian campaign in British history), to women, to welfare and to poverty.

This is not just a British story. At the turn of the last century, Sun Yatsen, later to become the first president of the Republic of China, was detained in the Chinese legation in London. The press got hold of the story and the British government secured his release, citing the precedent of Magna Carta.

And in 1949, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Sir Arthur Creech Jones, wrote to colonial governors about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: many of the recipients, aware of the potentially inflammatory nature of a document speaking of liberty and equality, “felt it wise to limit native knowledge of the document”.

After the First World War, veterans’ societies helped place an individual’s human rights above state sovereignty.

Furthermore, a Scottish politician, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, was one of those responsible for the drafting of The 1950 European Convention on Human Rights – many of the provisions of which were based on British common law rights.

Because of the need to avoid bright lights damaging old manuscripts, the exhibition involves a certain amount of peering at dimly-lit cabinets. But as always at the Library, there are beautiful and fascinating objects on display and use is made of audio and TV exhibits. Visitors can vote electronically on issues such as detention without charge and free speech and see how other visitors have voted. Using their bar code they can even continue their journey and view their results on their home computer.

This is a rich and absorbing show, of enormous educational value – every secondary school in the land would benefit from a visit – and full of interesting and revealing titbits and insights. The return of the Jews (expelled in 1190), for example, offers a nice illustration of the English way of muddling through: when rabbi and scholar Menasseh ben Israel petitioned Oliver Cromwell for the community’s readmission in the 1650s, Cromwell “never formally replied, but turned a blind eye. A practical form of toleration was achieved, and the London Jewish population began to grow.”

* Taking Liberties runs at the British Library, 96 Euston Road, NW1 until 1 March. It is free. Info: 0870 444 1500/

* Related events

* Interactive exhibition