HEFFER'S CHARTER OF HUMAN RIGHTS; as an Arsonist Is Granted the 'Human Right' to Carry a Cigarette Lighter, a Mail Writer Tries to Redress the Balance

Beginning of article

Byline: SIMON HEFFER

NO INDUSTRY in our country has grown more in the past few years than that aimed at securing our 'human rights'. A vast amount of public money is spent, usually entirely unproductively, on preventing common-sense laws and regulations from being imposed because they conflict with a largely foreign, and entirely abstract, concept of what these 'rights' should be.

Human rights laws came into being after World War II, and were aimed at preventing horrific crimes such as the murder under Hitler of millions of Jews.

Now, enshrined in British law under the Human Rights Act of 1998, they are being grotesquely abused for such trivial matters as allowing prisoners access to pornography while in jail or protecting the 'rights' of a convicted arsonist to carry a cigarette lighter in public.

This week came the most absurd case yet when a teenage thug, who had been ordered to stop wearing a hooded top as …