Sermon: René Cassin – Danny Friedman QC

Written by Writings & Sermons by others — 10 December 2016

In my day job, I’m a human rights lawyer who happens to be Jewish. But today, on World Human Rights Day, I’m going to tell you what it means to me to be a Jew who happens to be a human rights lawyer.

A lot of what I do involves representing terrorist suspects who, in the name of Islam, have planned and sometimes carried out terrorist attacks. The most common dinner party question I get asked when people find out about this is not, “How can you defend people if you know they are guilty?”; but “Do your clients know you are Jewish?”.   Admittedly as a work in progress this is my current answer.

Sixty-eight years ago today, the nations of the world signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This led to international laws. They are against killing, torture, slavery and unjust imprisonment. They value fairness, privacy, free speech and equality. What is extraordinary about these laws is that those who can claim their protection include the social outcasts and marginalised people of our society. The idea is only if there is a willingness to protect the worst and the weakest amongst us, that all of us can be secure that our own rights will be protected.

Why am I interested in all of this? Well one answer; not the only answer, is because I’m a member of Alyth. And this is where I learnt about the Holocaust in this building from the then Rabbi, Rabbi Dow Marmur. He was not only a Holocaust survivor, but a deep thinker about how we could forge a life together in its aftermath.

I was taught here, in this building, at Alyth, that the project of global human rights law that was begun in earnest 68 years ago was something of an answer to the Holocaust.  After the experience of total war, the world asked what kind of God makes his people suffer like this? The secular version of the question is what kind of modernity and Enlightenment tolerates the same. If, in secular terms, human rights are designed to recommit to the project of modernity and Enlightenment, then in religious terms it might be said they were designed as a means of recommitting to God.

What we are seeing, right now today, is that post-war project under intense pressure.  In a world increasingly defined by singular identities, such as nation, religion, or wealth, people will contest, sometimes with biblical effort (sometimes with Koranic effort), how much rights there are to go around.

Although there are many ways to learn that lesson, I learnt it through becoming a barrister in the late 1990s. That was at the point when the President of the Israeli Supreme Court, Judge Aaron Barak, was trying belatedly to convince the security forces of his own country that they should stop torturing terrorist suspects, even when it was believed that they knew where the bombs were ticking. This was because (as he unforgettably put it) “the price of democracy is that we fight our enemies with one hand tied behind our back”.  And then 9/11 happened and that impacted upon what I do: trying to get people out of Guantanamo Bay, appealing against terror suspects being deported to face torture, and investigating the British Army for torturing people in Iraq as it sought to serve this country’s aims.

We may know that democracies in Western States torture, and that non-democratic states are far worse; and non-state actors can be far worse than them.  But my response remains at one with Hannah Arendt – German-American Jewish philosopher – refugee from Holocaust Europe. She wrote, “the wrong done by my own people naturally grieves me more than the wrong done by other people”.

Which leads me back to a French Jew, René Cassin, one of the authors of the Universal Declaration. When he received a Nobel Prize in 1968, Cassin told his audience, “I adore my country with a heart that transcends it borders. The more I am French, the more I feel a part of humanity”. I think about those words a lot these days, because I agree that we can only truly celebrate individual identities through an attachment to the universal connection between us all. Sadly that sentiment has become that little more precarious in the last year.

Rene Cassin and others helped to draft the Declaration text that in its Preamble contains the words that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”, and it provides in its very first Article that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”. The extraordinary development in the history of ideas is that the drafters took the concept of dignity that in most languages once only referred to high status, and applied it to all people, everywhere.

Just like Rene Cassin finding humanity in his French identity, the idea of the inherent dignity of all humankind helps to bind the particular to the universal. There’s a similar idea in the Zulu concept of Ubunto (uu-boon-tu). It is enshrined in the post-Apartheid South African constitution. Ubunto means human kindness, humanness and describes a realization that I am/because you are.

You can reduce the human rights endeavour to a single idea. It is I am/because you are – Ubunto. It reminds us that we can only respect ourselves, when we respect others, even if we do not agree with them.

I am/because you are means that we cannot always be closed systems, of ourselves, of our families, of our communities, of our nations.  Strangers in our midst is not only a good thing, because they may need us, but because we grow from their arrival.

I am/because you are can sometimes be difficult, always changing, with no set ending. And in the spirit of I am/because you are let me share the short answers to the two dinner party questions that human rights lawyers like me who happen to be Jewish often get asked.

I do some times have sleepless nights for defending people who are guilty, but isn’t that part of being human and the genius of the idea of an absolute right to legal representation? And yes, my clients do know that I’m Jewish; and in that shared knowledge begins a conspiracy to wage, not necessarily peace, but to wage possibility.

Human rights are about waging possibility.

Long may they live, in this Synagogue; and elsewhere.

Shabbat shalom.