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20 Edinburgh L. Rev. 1 (2016)

handle is hein.journals/edinlr20 and id is 1 raw text is: The Edinburgh Law Review 20.1 (2016): 1-17 Edinburgh University Press DOI: 10.3366/elr.2016.0319 @ Edinburgh Law Review Trust and the Contributors www.euppublishing.com/journal/elr Human Rights and the Whirligig of Time Stephen Sedley* A. INTRODUCTION B. CULTURAL PRISMS AND HUMAN RIGHTS C. A BRITISH BILL OF RIGHTS D. HUMAN RIGHTS OVER TIME E. WHAT MAKES HUMAN RIGHTS SPECIAL F THE RELATIVISM OF NATURAL RIGHTS G. RELATIVISM V ABSOLUTISM H. CONCLUSION A. INTRODUCTION And thus, says Feste in the final scene of Twelfth Night, the whirligig of time brings in his revenges. The revenge I want to consider is not the political backlash against what the Sun once impartially described as the hated law which frees murderers to kill again, the 1998 Human Rights Act. It is the paradoxically contingent and variable nature, over time and over space, of human notions of incontestable, inalienable and universal rights: the revenge which time is for ever taking on things we imagine to be timeless. How is it that, at least in this country and in much of the western world, sexual relations between persons of the same gender have travelled in little more than a generation from the status of a sin and a crime to a status recognised by the law of marriage and protected by the human right of privacy? How is it that the right to private property has shrunk since the great revolutions of the eighteenth century from a sacred entitlement to a conditioned expectation? I don't expect to be able Rt Hon Sir Stephen Sedley, Judge of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales (1999-2011). This article is based upon the text of the annual Ruth Adler Memorial Lecture delivered at Edinburgh University Law School on 20 May 2015. 1

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