3
The Convention in a realist light
From real law come real rights; but from imaginary laws . . . come imaginary
rights. (Bentham)
This chapter takes issue with the claim – at the core of the human rights credo –
that human rights are natural or self-evident. It explores how the perceptions of
two bodies of theory which oppose this claim could be said to be reflected in the
Strasbourg case law.
The first critique on which the chapter focuses is that which was mounted by
Jeremy Bentham against the 1789 French Declaration; the second, that which
implicitly emanates from international relations (IR) realist scholars. These two
unrelated theoretical perspectives are juxtaposed in this chapter because they both
reject the idea that there exists a natural law which governs the conduct of the
state and which is therefore superior to positive national law (Bentham) or which
is fit to regulate the way states interact with each other (IR realism). In its own
way, each theory stresses the principle of national sovereignty. Both theories
regard the idea of human rights as emanating from above/outside the state/society
as nonsense. They thus urge us not to believe in the human rights orthodoxy.
This chapter will give many examples which indicate that it is possible to
consider that the Convention and its case law are dominated by realist considera-
tions. This is particularly clear in respect of Article 15 which allows the use of
derogation in times of national emergency, suggesting that we cannot believe the
words of the provisions which purport to guarantee rights. However, negating
altogether the influence on the system of supranational and/or idealistic impulses
is not justified; this chapter adopts the view that realism and idealism are in
tension with each other, including in the Convention system.
The ‘Anarchical Fallacies’ denounced by Bentham the ‘realist’
Jeremy Bentham is best known as the founder of utilitarianism. What interests me
in this chapter, however, is not so much his utilitarianism as what I call his
realism, a term I derive from the statement, which I put at the head of this
chapter, where he contrasts real rights with imaginary rights.

would have worried Bentham. On the contrary, as far as he is concerned, this is
exactly how things should be. Bentham-the-utilitarian believes that the government
is there to promote the common good; he also thinks that the government should be
able to make the rules. What Bentham opposes is the view that rights could some-
how be above the state, providing superior universal moral norms by which the state
must abide. Bentham-the-realist favoured rights – however imperfect – which
existed in the positive world over rights which were the product of the imaginations
of utopian dreamers. As far as he was concerned, the rights proclaimed in the
Declaration were ‘nonsense upon stilts’,
5
a ‘mere effusion of imbecility’.
6
By entitling his critique ‘Anarchical Fallacies’ Bentham indicated that the
Declaration was in his opinion conceptually fallacious: a nonsensical flow of words
amounting to nothing more than a bundle of contradictions. ‘Look to the letter,
you find nonsense – look beyond the letter, you find nothing.’
7
The problem as
Bentham saw it, however, was also practical. As far as he was concerned, the
Declaration invited the perpetual overthrow of current political institutions, thus
potentially leading to the ‘order of chaos’.
8
The title of his essay was meant
literally: the rights provided in the Declaration were meaningless and dangerous.
Bentham’s critique is broader than the ‘silly-or-pestilential’
9
argument. It
anticipates virtually all the themes addressed in this book.
10
Nonetheless, this

the French Declaration. Bentham clearly believed in the existence of positive
law only; for him natural law existed only in the imagination of those who
erroneously believed in it.
13
Bentham sees nonsense and contradiction all through the Declaration, up to its
last article, which reads: ‘Property being an inviolable and sacred right, no one can
be deprived of it, unless it be when public necessity, legally established, evidently
requires it and under the conditions of a just and previous indemnity.’ He writes:
Here we have the concluding article in this pile of contradictions; it does not
mismatch the rest. By the first article, all men are equal in respect of all sorts of
rights, and so are to continue for evermore, spite of everything which can be done by
laws. By the second article, property is of the number of those rights. By this
seventeenth and last article, no man can be deprived of his property – no, not a single
atom of it, without an equal equivalent paid – not when the occasion calls for it, for
that would not be soon enough, but beforehand; all men are equal in respect of
property, while John has £50,000 a-year, and Peter nothing: all men are to be equal
in property, and that for everlasting; at the same time that he who has a thousand times
as much as a thousand others put together, is not to be deprived of a single farthing of
it, without having first received an exact equivalent.
14
32 Who Believes in Human Rights?
Bentham sees the drafters of the Declaration as constantly oscillating between a
utopian world (where all men would be equal) and the real world (where they
clearly are not). This leads them to use words in different ways, and in ambiguous
ways, speaking for example of ‘can’, instead of ‘ought’.
15
Thus, Article 17 should
have read: ‘No one ought to be deprived’, rather than ‘can’ be deprived, of property
except in the circumstances described in the Article.
‘The order of chaos’

truth and decency, denies the validity of the law in question, – denies the existence of
it in the character of a law, and calls upon all mankind to rise up in a mass, and resist
the execution of it.
18
Bentham remarks in his preliminary observations:
The revolution, which threw the government into the hands of the penners and
adopters of this declaration, having been the effect of insurrection, the grand object
Realist light 33
evidently is to justify the cause. But by justifying it, they invite it . . . in justifying the
demolition of existing authorities, they undermine all future ones, their own conse-
quently in the number . . . ‘People, behold your rights! If a single article of them be
violated, insurrection is not your right only, but the most sacred of your duties’.
19
‘Look beyond the letter, you find nothing’
Bentham is known, not altogether accurately, as the founder of utilitarianism.
20
He devoted his life and intelligence to searching for principles of government
which would bring happiness to the greatest number. To achieve this utilitarian
aim, he turned to law. The law he had in mind was man-made. He was a
positivist. For him, it was clear that natural law did not exist, except as a figment
of the imagination of deluded thinkers. The American Constitution spoke of men
endowed with rights ‘by their Creator’ and of ‘self-evident truths’. The French
Declaration said in its Preamble that it ‘acknowledges and declares, in the
presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being’ the existence of ‘natural,
inalienable and sacred’ rights. All these phrases sound good, which is why they
have considerable appeal.
21
In fact they do not mean anything:
[F]rom real laws come real rights; but from imaginary laws, from laws of nature,
fancied by poets, rhetoricians, and dealers in moral and intellectual poisons, come

liberty shall be abridged, but in such points as it shall be abridged in, by the law. This,
we see, is saying nothing: it leaves the law just as free and unfettered as it found it.
26
The last sentence deserves our full attention. It encapsulates what constitutes to
my mind an enormous problem for current human rights law. To paraphrase
Bentham: giving or recognizing supposedly ‘natural’, ‘superior’, ‘inalienable’, ‘fun-
damental’ (whichever you choose to call them) rights which can then be defeated
through legislation amounts to nothing. Could it be said that this is what happens
in the European Convention system? To borrow Bentham’s words, does the
Convention provide real or imaginary rights?
The relative protection of the European Convention
and the margin of appreciation
Human rights are based on the idea that there is a core of fundamental rights
which originate from outside, and are above, the state (and beyond society
altogether). This superiority, derived from metaphysical immanence, is suppo-
sedly central to their raison d’e
ˆ
tre. If the rights provided in the Convention are
man-made rights, defined in a strictly positivist legal framework, this superiority
crumbles.
‘Look beyond the letter [of the Declaration], you find nothing’, Bentham
wrote. He observed that the rights ‘guaranteed’ in the Declaration could come
either with or without exceptions. On the latter hypothesis, the absolute phrasing
of the Declaration meant that any action by the government (including legisla-
tion) immediately flew in its face. On the former, the Declaration obviously failed
in its professed aim of setting up rights which could not be limited by the
government. At first sight, Bentham’s logic appears impeccable.
27
Following it, one could say that each of the substantive rights provided in the
European Convention is imaginary. Even the right to life contains exceptions

Realistically (I stress the word), governments would never have agreed to be
bound by the Convention if such a scenario had not been followed – and without
governments’ signature and ratification, the Convention would never have come
into being. It would therefore be stupid to criticize the drafters of the Convention
for having followed the practical path of providing for exceptions, at least if one
wanted to have something like the Convention.
Significantly, Bentham was of the view that the trouble with the French
Declaration lay not in the details of its phrasing, but in the fact that the enterprise
of drafting such a declaration had been conceived at all.
30
Can this be said of the
European Convention? To start answering this question (which is discussed in
various ways throughout the book), let us tease out further the relationship
between rights and exceptions in the Convention.
In one way or another all the exceptions concern ‘public order’ even though
the expression appears only occasionally in the text of the Convention.
31
To
simplify: when public order demands a particular course of action, the rights
guaranteed by the Convention no longer apply. Bentham had this to say about
exceptions governed by public order considerations:
Disturb the public order? – what does that mean? Louis XIV need not have hesitated
about receiving an article thus worded [Article 10 of the French Declaration on
freedom of expression and religion] into his code. The public order of things in this
behalf was an order in virtue of which the exercise of every religion but the Catholic,
according to his edition of it, was proscribed.
32
In this passage Bentham alerts us to the risk of deciding on rights and their
exceptions by reference to grand words, which can mean just about anything, and
the meaning of which is certain to vary depending on who is empowered to give

intact the supervisory function of the European Court. This is the theory, which
has since been repeatedly reaffirmed by the Court. However, not all commenta-
tors are convinced that the promised international supervision takes place in
practice. If they were right, it would be difficult not to conclude in the wake of
Bentham that the Convention rights (at least those diluted by the application
of the doctrine of the margin of appreciation) are illusory. For what is the good of
proclaiming, say, the right to liberty and security if an individual can be detained
when the government deems it necessary – or merely appropriate? The same
question arises in respect of the other rights listed in the Convention.
Negating the Convention system? Derogations under Article 15
The problem is not just that exceptions are very often attached to the rights
provided in the Convention; it is also that these rights can sometimes simply be
‘erased’. Article 15 of the Convention provides that: ‘In time of war or other public
emergency threatening the life of the nation any High Contracting Party may take
measures derogating from its obligations under this Convention to the extent
strictly required by the exigencies of the situation.’
36
Article 15 often comes as a surprise to students: what is the good of having a
Convention, they ask, if the guarantee of the protection of fundamental rights it
supposedly provides can be annihilated through derogations? The basic answer is:
without a provision of this kind, governments would never have been willing to
Realist light 37
be bound by the Convention.
37
At the same time, the drafters of the Convention
were very well aware that the point of the Convention was precisely to limit state
power.
38
Obviously the right to derogate had to be limited if it was not to be
abused. The solution of the drafters was to circumscribe the use of derogation in

in mind, also takes place in the case of an emergency which leads a government to
adopt extreme measures. Referring to Article 15 would have the advantage, from
the perspective of the protection of fundamental freedoms, of publicizing the
government’s action (as notification must occur) and of making it clear that the
derogation is meant to have a temporary character (as emergencies are not
supposed to last forever).
39
The fact that one may regret the absence of the filing
of derogations in respect of Articles 8 to 11 of the Convention speaks for itself:
Article 15 is not necessarily as bad as some students spontaneously believe. From a
realist perspective, it provides, or at least should provide, limits to governmental
impulses to do away with the Convention. This statement, however, immediately
needs to be qualified. As Harris and his co-authors have seen, ‘[o]nce the necessity
for derogation is conceded, it becomes difficult to control abusive recourse to the
power of suspending rights that [Article 15] permits’.
40
The problem is com-
pounded by the fact that Article 15 is an area of the Convention where the
Strasbourg institutions have granted states a wide margin of appreciation.
38 Who Believes in Human Rights?
Although Article 15 has given rise to a limited number of decisions, its sig-
nificance cannot be overestimated, for it provides for a mechanism which has the
potential to destroy the entire edifice of the Convention by making it possible to
remove supposedly fundamental guarantees at the heart of the democratic process.
Of course, when this occurs, the removal is supposed to constitute a response to real
dangers, including terrorism, which, to use the words of Article 15, ‘threaten the life
of the nation’. Perhaps there is no problem with Article 15 as such. Even if this
controversial point is conceded, it remains the case that the approach adopted by
the Court when facing Article 15 claims is extremely problematic.
Article 15 is rarely mentioned in the early chapters of legal commentaries on

society or other arguably influential actors. It is essentially pessimistic in that it
does not believe that progress is possible in international politics.
43
Phrased in
simple words, the theory has it that the state will always follow its own interests; it
will do whatever is required (as long as it can afford to do it) to ensure its survival;
it will not be guided by a supposedly universal morality; it will tend to rely on
itself whenever possible given that cooperation is inadvisable as other states, by
definition, also follow their own interests and cannot be trusted; state sovereignty
is a chief concern. Tim Dunne and Brian Schmidt encapsulate the theory in ‘three
Ss’: statism, survival and self-help.
44
Realist light 39
The classical theorists of realism developed the idea of a dual moral standard.
Accordingly, one morality exists for the private sphere; another and very different
one for the public sphere. Machiavelli, for example, stated:
A prince . . . cannot observe all those things for which men are considered good, for
in order to maintain the state he is often obliged to act against his promise, against
charity, against humanity, and against religion. And therefore, it is necessary that he
have a mind ready to turn itself according to the way the winds of fortune and the
changeability of [political] affairs require . . . [A]s long as it is possible, he should not
stray from the good, but he should know how to enter into evil when necessity
commands.
45
The idea of raison d’e
´
tat (literally, reason of state) has been taken up by Hans
J. Morgenthau in the twentieth century. Morgenthau, like E. H. Carr before him,
was highly critical of American President Woodrow Wilson and rejected the idea
that political ethics should be brought into line with private ethics. As far as he

associated not so much with a different kind of morality existing for statesman-
ship as with the idea that morality is altogether put aside by statesmen. Realism,
as antithesis of morality, comes to be seen as a fact of life which corresponds to
the egoistic nature of man and points to the structuring effect of power in
international relations. Realism, from this perspective, is not a vision but an
inescapable fact. Realists of this second, behaviouralist, persuasion merely
observe that states are unwilling to act in ways which restrict their power. In
their view, states simply cling to power as much and as long as they can; they act
in apparently immoral ways because it is in their interest to do so, not because
they follow a public morality different from the one governing relations
between individuals.
40 Who Believes in Human Rights?
Comparing Bentham and IR realism
The shift in the theoretical grounding of this chapter from Bentham to IR realism
may appear incongruous since these two bodies of theory are not generally
regarded as complementary to each other.
50
Bentham was principally interested
in the internal conduct of a government; as its name indicates, international
relations is interested in international matters. Bentham was infused with opti-
mism, and wanted to establish positive guidelines for government to follow. He
believed that progress was possible. By contrast, international relations takes a
pessimistic view of human nature; it seeks to discover how states should or do
interact without thinking that progress is really possible. Bentham was a liberal;
51
IR realism emerged in opposition to liberalism.
52
Nonetheless connections between the two strands of ‘realism’ can easily be
established. As the anti-insurrectional leitmotif of ‘Anarchical Fallacies’ indicates,
Bentham highly valued state survival. He wanted to avoid internal (as opposed to

56
This
study makes apparent a series of twists in the development of the case, typically
obscured in legal commentaries but indicating clearly the ‘realist’ mindsets of the
actors involved.
Realist light 41
The case concerned the handling by the United Kingdom of the insurrection
that developed in the 1950s in its (then) colony of Cyprus. Faced with an
increasingly violent movement which sought a union with Greece, the Governor
had introduced repressive legislation and emergency powers, including a Deten-
tion of Persons Law in July 1955. Aware that this legislative act was plainly in
violation of Article 5 of the Convention, on liberty and the security of the person,
the British had sent a notice of derogation to Strasbourg in October. The violence
on the island deepened in the following months; the colonial government
responded with executive detentions, rough (or worse) treatments, executions,
curfews, censorship, the closing of schools, the destruction of tree plantations, etc.
After a months-long debate, it also deported in March 1956 Archbishop Makar-
ios, a national figure, to another colony (namely, the Seychelles). Two months
later, the British Government found itself, much to its surprise and consterna-
tion, the object of an application at Strasbourg. This was not an individual
application, which was not possible since the United Kingdom was not to sign
the relevant optional clause until 1966 (when, having lost most of its colonies,
the application of the Convention in these territories had ceased to be deeply
problematic). The application was lodged by the Greek Government. It was the
first inter-state application to be brought at Strasbourg.
57
Greece alleged that the United Kingdom was violating nearly all the substantive
provisions of the Convention in Cyprus. The British did not doubt that the
application was motivated by a political plan which aimed at the incorporation
into a Greater Greece of the island (where lived a substantial Turkish minority).

The United Kingdom basically won this argument as the Commission developed,
on its own initiative, the doctrine of the margin of appreciation. As Simpson
explains, the doctrine was unnecessary to the Commission’s decision, for the
majority believed that the colonial authorities had acted correctly, as the circum-
stances demanded.
62
Nevertheless the commissioners were uneasy about ‘being
cast in a role which might require them to pass judgment on the decisions taken
by the government of Cyprus’.
63
Simpson quotes the views expressed by various
commissioners in the course of the debates that preceded the adoption of the
Commission’s report. Clearly the doctrine emerged as a way of addressing the
uncertainties they were grappling with.
The Report of the Commission, dated 26 September 1958 (but released only in
1997),
64
gave its opinion on the existence of an emergency that threatened the life
of the nation (i.e. the colonial existence of Cyprus):
. . . [the incidents which form the background to the derogation] emanated from a
fast growing and militant organisation which, according to its own statements, aimed
at obtaining self-determination for Cyprus by all possible means, including force and
violence. These two factors together make it at least plausible to assume that there . . .
existed . . . a public danger threatening the life of the nation. The assessment whether
or not a public danger existed is a question of appreciation. The United Kingdom
Government made such an assessment of the situation prevailing at that time and
concluded that there existed a public danger threatening the life of the nation.
65
On the question of whether the measures adopted had been strictly required,
the report took a similar view and articulated the position that the state which

giving rise to the Second Cyprus Case.
71
The meticulous study of this case by
Simpson brings back to life the power games which realists expect or know states
play before the European Court of Human Rights – but which are unlikely to be
played overtly and tend to become lost anyway in the texts of judgments that
articulate ‘neat’ legal arguments.
When Greece lodged her second application, the British Government reacted
by trying to have the whole of the second application declared inadmissible.
When this failed, it nonetheless persuaded the Commission to declare twenty
cases inadmissible after the first hearing. These included cases where the British
knew that unjustifiable violence had occurred. For example, in case 1, a doctor
had confirmed that the applicant had come out of detention with broken ribs.
72
The initial declarations of inadmissibility raised Britain’s hope that there would
not be an enquiry on the spot. The British legal team worked to have further cases
declared inadmissible. It also sought to delay the proceedings while endeavouring
to put the blame for these delays on the Greeks. As it turned out, the British
greatly benefited from these delaying tactics: the awareness by the Commission
that contact had taken place between the Foreign Ministries of Greece and Turkey
in the United Nations in December 1958 persuaded it to put the outstanding
Cyprus application on the ‘back burner’.
73
In February 1959, a political settlement
for the island was discussed at Zurich and formalized in London. This led the
agents for both the British and the Greek governments to request in May that
the proceedings should be terminated without an examination of the substance of
the application. The Commission reported to this effect in July 1959, accepting
that ‘some friction might be engendered by the continuance of an investigation
into as yet unproved allegations’.