Mr Bush decided for instance that all the Guantanamo prisoners were unlawful combatants and

Mr Bush decided, for instance, that all the Guantanamo prisoners were “unlawful combatants” and therefore outside the ambit of the Geneva Convention. In fact the coalition appears to have created a gulag stretching from Afghanistan through Iraq and ending in Guantanamo Bay, where “undesirables” can be held without charge, without rights, without dignity, without proper rations, without adequate medical attention and can be mistreated for as long as Stalin, sorry I mean Messrs Bush and Blair, decide.Mr Bush even boasted about it. On Wednesday, the Government will publish the White Paper proposing a new Commission for Equality and Human Rights (CEHR). For years now, innovative policy advocates have argued that we need a radical re-shaping of our institutions to combat various discrimination and to promote universal human rights. Six years ago, as research fellow at the left-of-centre think tank, The Institute for Public Policy Research, I was inspired to support this idea by my colleague Sarah Spencer and the passionate human rights expert, Francesca Klug. My enthusiasm came partly out of disillusionment.
In a pamphlet, After Multiculturalism, I argued that old responses to inequality and our multicultural policies had become counter-productive, a view which now apparently appeals to Trevor Phillips.I have come to believe that the existing structures which we have to deal with inequalities are outmoded and divisive. Britain deserves better protection and a greater sense of shared ideals.

We should retire the Commission for Racial Equality, the Equal Opportunities Commission and the Disability Rights Commission (and hand over knighthoods to all who have served nobly for their particular cause). In their stead, we need a national institution with a fiercely independent leader and the power and resources to safeguard the human rights of all our citizens and residents.Getting to this point has not been easy Women’s groups have been muttering objections for months. The 1990 Trust, an umbrella organisation of black and Asian campaigners, vociferously rejects the single commission and protests that this is yet another trick to dilute the evil of white racism.There is a new addiction about – victims vying with each other for attention and special consideration. The new film The Saddest Music in the World – written by Kazuo Ishiguro – is a beautiful observation of this growing tendency the world over.The new commission may help us counter this malignancy by getting people to empathize across their borders and understand there is no top dog in the business of human misery. Even more importantly, the commission has a vital role to change our culture so we deepen our commitment to human rights and to moral principles.So I should be rejoicing to hear of the White Paper But I am not. The proposal comes as we experience a deplorable collapse of human rights in our country.

Why all this breast-beating about British and American soldiers and the Geneva Convention when both governments have so systematically undermined the spirit and standards of that convention, and other agreements too? We comfort ourselves (rightly) that we are still better than Saudi Arabia and Burma. That is our low benchmark now.There are Guantanamo Bay and Belmarsh Prison to show how far we have slipped from our ideals. Then there are the asylum-seekers in the UK, most of them hopeless victims of “Bogus! Bogus! Bogus!” claims by New Labour apparatchiks. These politicians tell us that this country welcomes “genuine” asylum-seekers, and only detests sham applications.How wrong they are.