Trevor Phillips keynote speech to the Human Rights Lawyers' Association on 15 June: "Britain's New Commission for Equality and Human Rights: Challenges and Opportunities" 

Thank you.

It's a pleasure to be here with you this evening, and to share a platform with Monica McWilliams and Maurice Manning - pioneers in the field of human rights.  We know that we have a great deal to learn from their experience, and I will be aiming to sit down as quickly as I can because I sincerely want to hear what they have to say, so that I can steal their good ideas and pass them off as my own in the run up to the launch of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights in a little over three months. Spookily we open for business just 100 days after June 24th the day the Labour Party acquires a new leader; could the CEHR become the culmination of someone's first hundred day plan?

1. What is CEHR going to be?

Whatever, when the Commission opens in October, by its very existence will allow this country to claim two unique accomplishments:

• It will be Great Britain's first national body tasked with promoting the values of the Human Rights Act.
• And we will be the first full spectrum equalities and human rights organisation of our kind and size in the world.

The Commission will be able to tackle inequality, discrimination and injustice in a way that no British public body has previously been able.

We will have greater flexibility, independence, power and resources than any of the heritage equality commissions have enjoyed. And we will be broader in scope than many government departments.

The CEHR will be an advocate for, and defender of, the disadvantaged. We have to be. But we have to be more. We have to be a change maker for the whole of society - a body which uses its leadership role, powers and capability to build a society that recognises the worth of all people, and ensures that no-one is excluded or treated inhumanely. In essence, we must start from the point of view, not that we are here to defend separate interests, but to create a society that makes such a defence unnecessary. This means a society at ease with all aspects of human diversity, based on fairness and justice.

So I do not need to emphasise the scale of our ambition. Yet to read the reports this week of the Government's Green paper on the reform of Discrimination Law, which will be part of our mandate you might imagine that the last remaining frontiers for the battle against inequality were access to the bar for women - not your legal Bar, but that of the local golf club - and the right to breast feed in public, both issues of genuine importance for some. But for those of us without the desire to exploit the former or the equipment to do the latter we might be forgiven for thinking that bigger challenges remain for the Commission. And the conditions could not be more favourable to high ambition.

We have an Administration and a principal opposition both of whom are in theory at least friendly towards equality and human rights; we have a new Commission dedicated to both; and we have the possibility of a truly original and innovative piece of legislation on the horizon. This is a spectacular constellation of forces. We cannot let this chance slip.

This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to transform the legal basis  for Equality and Human Rights in our country from the restrictive, finger wagging bureaucratic monster much of our media alternately derides and disdains to a truly liberating set of instruments and institutions that help everyone in our society to realise their true potential as human beings.

For those of us who care about music (or have seen Peter Shaffer's Amadeus), the Single Equality Act could be our Salieri - a pedestrian, mediocre measure which will leave the audience yawning.  Or it could be our Mozart - at its best majestic and revolutionary, and with themes that lift the spirit.

As perhaps the principal violinist in this particular band (I wouldn't steal the conductor's baton from our political masters) I of course want to play Mozart. And one of the principal new themes on which I desperately want the British audience to hear is that called human rights - and I want it marked fortissimo and played risoluto and espressivo. 

This is our mandate. And tonight I want to talk about how we can adapt one of the most magical of Mozartian operatic techniques - the interweaving and elaboration of apparently competing themes to produce for example the overture to the Magic Flute.

The two themes all too often placed in opposition to each other make up the title of the Commission I will lead: Equality and Human Rights.

Tonight, I want to start by explaining why I think the relationship between the two themes matters; and why I think, creatively played they can produce a profound harmony rather than discord. I would like to go on to explore the current climate for human rights in Britain; finally, I'd like to sketch some of the parts for the piece we hope to present that will in the next few years beguile and engage people in a fresh, British human rights culture, whose tunes they may not be able to analyse or write down - but whose words they can certainly sing.

Abandoning metaphor for a moment, the fact is that creating an active, popular human rights culture in Britain will be a central task for our Commission. It will also be the toughest, and most controversial aspect of our mandate. And I am clear about the political risks of this: history shows that this is the sort of task the first leader of an organisation like the Commission for Equality and Human Rights may not survive.

2. Relationship between equalities and human rights in the CEHR

So let me start with the relationship between equalities and human rights.

At root that relationship lies not in our aspiration for both, but in the process that characterises their deprivation. The path to the absence of human rights is too characteristically marked by the systematic imposition of inequality on a group of people, followed by their humiliation and indignity, and terminated by the destruction of their humanity. The imposition of systematic inequality, in short is often the prelude to the deprivation of human rights.

This year we mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. 12 million Africans were kidnapped, shipped and traded like cattle, and subjected to horrific abuse. For several generations, no one questioned whether this might be wrong because, quite simply, slaves were viewed as sub-human. They were not equal, so the denial of their most basic rights was not seen as an aberration.

In 1930s Germany, a creeping aggregation of everyday humiliations led to an officially sanctioned culture of anti-semitism, followed by the gradual erosion of the rights of Jews - and others - and eventually their systematic extermination. The Nazis turned them second-class citizens, and then into some kind of sub-human species, which ended in the Holocaust - a genocide tacitly tolerated by an entire people. Again, inequality precipitated a full-scale removal of human rights.

And today in Darfur, we see it again. The Darfur crisis is a complex and multi-faceted one. But one key root cause is the structural inequality between the centre of Sudan and the peripheral areas of the country, such as Darfur, and the long-standing inequality between the black Africans and Arabs. When inequality so powerfully contributes to one part of a nation feeling that it has nothing in common with another, we end up with wholescale human rights violations because not enough people care about the suffering of those who are not like them.

So my first point is that all too often inequality legitimises the deprivation of human rights. It is the role of equality and human regimes to prevent us from slipping easily into the unthinking acceptance of everyday degradation of others. From even the smallest act of degradation follows all too easily, the deprivation of dignity and respect, and in turn the application of unequal treatment, and in time, inhuman treatment.

But the relationship between equality and human rights also has a positive dimension. They are bound together not just in the context of their absence; but also in their defence.

Equality, for me is not just about reducing disparities of wealth or the absence of discrimination. In our real lives, we know that we feel unequal for a whole series of other reasons than the material - because no-one in authority will listen to us, because we feel that others gain advantages because they know the right people, because they are allowed to say things with impunity that we ourselves could not sanction. But we don't really have a framework for these kinds of inequality at present.

I believe that the human rights framework can provide substance to a deeper, more fruitful concept of equality. Human rights flesh out a positive notion of equality that includes security, dignity, freedom of expression, rights to participation and due process. They help us to develop an understanding of equality that is more about what we are capable of and less about what traditionally has held us back. It is this richer definition of equality underlies the Scorecard measures put forward by the Equality Review to the Prime Minister and which I hope will form part of the new and entirely original Equality Public Service Agreement being consulted upon by the Treasury as part of the Comprehensive Spending Review.

If the Treasury does what I hope it will do, and we at the Commission for Equality and Human Rights do our job well this will be a massive step forward for Britain. Legally, equality has been viewed as a coin of two sides, with the 'advantaged' on one side, and the 'disadvantaged' on the other - men and women, white and ethnic minority, non-disabled and disabled, for example. The legal expression has been the requirement for real-life comparators. And progress towards equality has been measured by how much supposedly 'disadvantaged' individuals are able to behave and be treated like a traditionally 'advantaged' comparator.

A human rights framework could transform our account of equality by taking us beyond narrow comparators and discrimination grounds to a new definition of equality that is based on fairness and freedom. In this light, whether or not we are equal can be measured firstly, by whether we have what we need to lead a successful, flourishing life and secondly, by our ability to be authentically ourselves - true to ourselves - regardless of how we may differ from others.

Second, a human rights framework will do something vital for equality bureaucrats that we have always found hard - to give true relative weight to the many different kinds of equality that we value - outcomes, procedural, opportunity for example. To return to the golf club for a moment - we know that we don't want women to be shouldered aside at the bar - but is this really as important as ensuring that there are women on the Committee? Or that the club's hours cater to women with children just as much as they do to those without? Or that the walk from the 9th Green back to the clubhouse is as safe as it can be? Or that there is an equal number of women in the House of Commons. Human rights may be indivisible, but both the Convention and the Act make clear that some articles take precedence over others.

3. CEHR's responsibilities on human rights

Of course, when it comes down to the final analysis, all of this acquires meaning only when enforceable. In terms of our legal work, the CEHR is not able to take freestanding human rights cases directly, although we can through funding help organisations that do take on human rights casework, and we will be able to intervene in any human rights case.  We will also be able to carry out human rights inquiries and investigations, which is a powerful tool. But it would be wrong to pretend that we possess the same range of enforcement powers in relation to human rights as we do in the field of equality.

This does not mean that we will be more passive in the human rights arena than we are in equality. It just means that we will have to be active in a different way. Building a positive culture of human rights, in which human rights become a guiding framework that inform the way we behave, will be one of our earliest priorities. That means demonstrating how human rights can change society for the better, for us collectively, and for us individually. It includes talking up the cases in which a human rights culture can genuinely transform real people's lives.

This promotion, or if you like campaigning role is by no means the poor cousin to human rights legal work. Building a new narrative about anything is not an easy task. 

But if we are to have a society in which the basic principles of humanity, decency and fairness inform our modus operandi with the state and with each other, we have to make that positive narrative around human rights central to Britain's future. 

4. Why 'human rights' has become a dirty word

But all of you know how hard this is going to be. 'Human rights' has become a dirty word for large swathes of the British population.

It is seen as a charter for miscreants of all sorts, favouring criminals at the expense of security, the dignity of victims, or just 'common sense'. It is, apparently, misused and abused by government departments as a scapegoat when things go wrong, milking the public's - I'm afraid - natural prejudices against anything involving lawyers.

The Daily Mail has told us that the Human Rights Act "blights every aspect of our lives" and has been "exploited by terrorists, criminals, travellers and celebrities - not to mention lining the pockets of Left-wing, human rights lawyers, most prominently in Cherie Blair's Matrix Chambers". Michael Howard said that it undermines Britain's traditions of tolerance and fair play, "turning common sense on its head".

When David Cameron last year said that he was ready to ditch the Human Rights Act, the Sun claimed him as one singing from its own songsheet. The Act, they said, is nothing more that something that "criminals and grasping lawyers bend to their own advantage".

Media sensationalism and the rhetoric of some public figures have fuelled some notorious popular myths:

Here are some examples:

• Last year the media reported that a suspected car thief in Gloucester who bombarded police with bricks and tiles during a rooftop siege was given a Kentucky Fried Chicken takeaway meal by officers to ensure his "well-being and human rights". In fact, in a statement by police, they said that the food was part of the negotiation strategy. But the press chose not to report that statement of fact.
• The high-profile case in which a police authority refused to publish photographs of convicted prisoners on the run, which the media wrongly interpreted as being due to the fact that this would breach the escaped convicts' right to privacy. In fact, the police decided against publication for operational reasons. No human rights would have been violated by the publication of their mugshots.
• The case of the prisoner Dennis Nilsen who challenged a decision of the Prison Governor to deny him access to hard core pornographic material by arguing that the ban breached his human right of freedom of expression. It was front page news. But inevitably, the case failed at the very first hurdle. It never entered the judicial system at all, apart from to be thrown out. Of course human rights legislation would never legitimise his request for pornography; Nilsen failed to make even an arguable case that a breach of his human rights had occurred. But the media failed to report the second half of the story - which demonstrated clearly that the Human Rights Act, far from endorsing this distasteful claim, dismissed it pretty much on commonsense grounds.

• And then there are the celebrity cases, like that of Catherine Zeta Jones and Michael Douglas who invoked their right to privacy to protect their exclusive deal with 'Hello' magazine, from which they earned hundreds of thousands of pounds. The impression that Human Rights is yet another wheeze to protect the rich and famous and to feed their fat cat lawyers more cream received another boost.

True, not all quarters of society view human rights negatively. But what cases like these make clear is the size of our task. We would be naïve to think that the human rights framework has the universal and unquestioned assent that liberal intellectuals give it. And it would be quite dangerous for us to be lulled into some false self-assurance that we do not have work to do in telling a story for human rights that captures positively the public imagination.

5. Where we are now: HRA only has meaning in its breach

Part of the problem is that we have drifted to a place where human rights only have meaning in their breach. The current human rights culture is a negative one: it speaks of rights curtailed, and rarely of rights promoted. And where we do hear cases of rights promoted, they seem so perverse or self-indulgent as to defy belief.

So how do we turn this around?

6. So what story should we be telling about human rights in this country: how can we make human rights indigenous?

I believe that telling the positive story for human rights involves a developing a uniquely British interpretation of human rights. I also believe that we can give this interpretation without abandoning the Human Rights Act or breaching the European Convention on Human Rights. At the CEHR, we sometimes say, a little flippantly, that the British approach to a human rights framework is like the American approach to soccer: the rest of the world loves it, but we just don't get it. But the European Convention of Human Rights, on which the Human Rights is based, was largely drafted by British lawyers. And the whole point of a Human Rights Act was to repatriate human rights, so that British cases did not have to be taken to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg but could be dealt with by the British courts.

The question is how can we create a national sense of ownership over our human rights framework? How can we make human rights indigenous?

The Britishness agenda is currently being debated with gusto in political circles. Our future Prime Minister is a well-known advocate of a practical, workable British identity that elucidates our shared values and gives us a common sense of purpose. This, he says, will help us to address the economic, demographic, constitutional, security and social challenges that we as a nation face. He has gone so far as to say that almost every question that we have to deal with about the future of Britain revolves around what we mean by Britishness, whether it is asylum or immigration, the future of the constitution, our relationship with Europe or terrorism.

But where do we start in defining our Britishness? Do we start from our particular symbols and our traditions, or from our fundamental values, such as the rule of law, which almost any liberal democratic society would subscribe to? The former seem too exclusive to accommodate new citizens, the latter too broad and nebulous to be meaningful.

I think a British interpretation of human rights might actually be the best place to start. This would not be merely a list of universal human rights, but a specifically British expression of those values, which is characteristically different from say America or France.

Professor Linda Colley has argued that our British identity is not a natural phenomenon, any more than is our rural landscape. Both have been carefully and deliberately constructed over centuries in response to our needs as a nation. We destroyed vast forests to create agricultural land, and then created a new myth of the historic English countryside.

Our national identity was forged to manage our historic ethnic, linguistic and cultural mix. By imagining continental Europeans (first the French, later the Germans) and the colonised peoples of Africa and Asia as Britain's defining others we constructed an extraordinarily robust idea of Britishness. Our need to fight wars, the fact that we were all Protestants and the self-interest of ruling a massive global empire held us together as a nation. Professor Colley argues that today's debate about Britishness is prompted by the extent of our post-war decline, in which we are no longer kept together by these three defining things.

I think she's right. But our history has unwittingly given us the material for the injection of a new kind of national glue. I believe that we could be kept together by the distinctly British interpretation of our basic rights. It is true as some say that basic values like liberty and equality have no national character. But they do have national expressions which can be hugely different.

Compare Britain with France, where the right to equality is expressed in the staunchly republican ideal and a conception of citizenship that denies political significance to individual identity - whether that is a faith identity or an ethnic or linguistic identity.

Or America, where the right to liberty has its roots in the country's immigration narrative, in which people fled their countries of origin, often because of religious persecution, to find a home in America where they could be exactly who they wanted to be. In my view, this expression of liberty has given rise to a segregated society, in which groups like the Amish or the Mormons can live completely separate, un-integrated lives, and feel no compulsion to connect with others in their society.

In Britain, we have interpreted our fundamental rights quite differently. For us, the right to liberty means deep suspicion and hostility to a bureaucratic, authoritarian state, a suspicion ingrained in our society since the days of the Magna Carta; for us, tolerance translates as a certain acceptance of newcomers; the right to freedom of expression often materialises as a predilection for eccentricity, healthy tradition of political satire and latterly a tolerance for the diversity of behaviour by people with different ethnic origins; the right to respect for private life is expressed in our fiercely individualistic streak.

Britons would fight and struggle for these expressions of their values. History shows that it isn't an overstatement to say that we would probably rather die than relinquish them. Perhaps this is the test of our Britishness. They are human rights shared across the democratic world, but they are British expressions of those human rights.

7. Defence against authority

A fundamental part of promoting an active, distinctively British human rights culture will be to explain what human rights remedies may mean in this country.

This is two-fold: human rights remedy the vulnerability of the individual to the over-mighty state; they also provide a framework to tackle conflicts and promote integration. I want briefly to discuss each of these in turn.

Human rights should help those who at risk of the heavy-handed application of authority. Human rights legislation has been used to help individuals, such as the elderly and the disabled, who are faced with indignity at the hands of the state.

We have heard about the local authority that wanted to separate a couple who had been married for decades by putting them in separate care homes when they could not look after themselves. Action under the Human Rights Act prevented that. The adult children of an elderly woman who was fed her breakfast while sitting on a commode used the Human Rights Act to argue that that was against her human rights, and stopped the mistreatment.

In the field of disability, the Human Rights Act has been used to overcome the shortcomings of the Disability Discrimination Act to great effect.

For example, in a case in East Sussex, two disabled sisters had a dispute with the local authority over employees lifting them manually, with the local authority claiming that manual lifting was too great a health and safety risk for employees.

Judging in favour of the sisters, Mr Justice Munby drew on human rights principles and referred to 'the physical and psychological integrity' of the person, to find at the heart of that integrity the central value of 'human dignity' and 'the right of disabled people to participate in the life of the community', matched by the positive obligation of the State to make that participation a meaningful possibility. As a result of the case, East Sussex local authority amended its Safety Code of Practice on Manual Handling to include the dignity and rights of those being lifted. The Code was circulated to other local authorities, NHS trusts and care providers. This is a concrete example of how human rights law can translate into principles which change policy for the better.

Legal cases like these test the law. They also force moves towards more progressive, fairer practices. Legal cases raise awareness about what is, and is not, acceptable; they provide guidelines for public authorities that may be unsure of how to behave towards vulnerable users of their services.

But our ultimate aim in creating a human rights culture is to reduce the need to resort to legislation retrospectively, after a human rights abuse has taken place. If we are successful, human rights principles, as basic principles of decency and dignity, will be embedded into public authorities' approach to service delivery; they will become, to use Cherie Blair's phrase "models of good practice". This is part of what we mean by an active human rights culture.

Cases of elderly couples in care homes, and of disabled people being made to suffer inhumane treatment, are examples to which most people instinctively and emotively respond.

The harder job will be promoting an active human rights culture for those who are equally at risk but who are also unpopular; those who society wants to forget. I am speaking of people like psychiatric patients and Gypsies & Travellers. I am speaking also of asylum seekers and prisoners.

We have important work to do to raise awareness of the indignity suffered by these groups of people. And once awareness has been raised, we need to explain why and how the unpopular need human rights just as much as the more loved members of our society.

Here are some examples:

• The "nearest relative" of a young woman who was liable for detention under the Mental Health Act was her adoptive father. This man had abused her as a child. But the legislative scheme did not allow the patient or anyone else to challenge his status as nearest relative. In a striking example of the common sense version of a human rights culture, the High Court declared that this was incompatible with the Act.
• The recent report from the British Institute for Human Rights, 'Changing Lives', tells of a mental health hospital that had a practice of sectioning without the use of an interpreter asylum seekers who spoke little or no English. BIHR provided human rights training that successfully challenged this practice.
• In 2002, a case held that when a Gypsy sought planning permission for a caravan site, due to a cultural aversion to bricks and mortar, it would breach his human rights to take account of an offer of conventional housing that had been made to him.
• Last year, the Court quashed a planning inspector's decision to refuse a Gypsy family planning permission because he had wrongly considered the local residents' 'fear of crime' when there was no evidential basis for the existence of such a fear.
• The BIHR cites a case where Muslim men in detention were told that they could not shower before going to a mosque because it would interfere with prison bathing schedules.
• And there is Zahid Mubarak, the young Asian man who was forced to share a cell with a deranged racist. His cellmate attacked with him a table leg the night before his release, and he died in a coma a week later. His family argued, successfully but after a fight, that the breach of his human right to life entitled them to a public inquiry into his death.

These are people who, by definition, do not have a voice and whose needs the wider public cannot easily relate to or understand. The victim would be the prime beneficiaries of a human rights culture.

8. Good relations and resolving dispute

A human rights culture can also provide us with a means of framing the discussions that are needed to promote integration or tackle difficult issues between communities.

Britain has a long history of dealing with diversity. But what we are facing now is hyper-diversity. Real and dramatic social and demographic change is taking place in this country on a scale not seen since the industrial revolution. It relates not only to migration and ethnicity, but also to changing family structures, an ageing population, more of us defining ourselves as disabled people, and a more hospitable environment for gay and trans people.

In a hyper-diverse society, shared values are the fundamental glue that holds us together. The way we behave towards each other is the outward manifestation of our values. By using a human rights framework that is distinctively British, we can develop codes of conduct, dignity and respect to guide us through this entirely modern dilemma.

To try to make this clear, let me use a common metaphor. There are millions of cars on British roads. Not only does the vast range of vehicles reflect our human diversity; what we do with them mirrors the myriad tasks we have to perform in the narrow strips of highway that we share. Given all this, and the fact that each of us really wants to do our own thing in our cars and get where we are going in the shortest time possible, it is quite extraordinary that we manage this diversity of type and purpose so amiably and with relatively little conflict. That's because we have rules, encompassed in our Highway Code. We all learn it; and though few of us could recite it after passing our tests, we intuitively know what it demands of us in situations where we interact with other road users - at junctions, roundabouts and so on.

In the old days, when cars were fewer and pretty much identical none of this mattered. But numbers and diversity bring special challenges. They demand ways of managing our interactions, most of which are voluntary and consensual. We drive on one side of the road, we stop at lights, we give priority to emergency vehicles.

But the Code is not simply a neutral document, with no intrinsic values. It has one basic underlying proposition - that all road users have rights; and irrespective of how small or mundane your vehicle might be, it has the same right to respect as any other vehicle. We only make exceptions for vehicles that are serving the community's interest rather than their driver's - police, ambulances and the like. We take this for granted today, but it is not obvious that it has to be this way.

We do not have to imagine what it would be like to have a code based on other values. During the Soviet era, some cities reserved lanes for the Zil automobiles of party officials. As they swished by in their Lada, I don't suppose that the citizens of Moscow reflected that the special lane represented the correctness of democratic centralism, and the leading role of the party; but they would know for certain that liberal democracies wouldn't do things this way.

The rules of our community are no different in principle, except that in this country they are not generally written down, nor are they made explicit. Although the Human Rights Act sets out the essential framework for these rules, our particular interpretation of them defines Britain as a nation.

In practice, a British human rights framework should be the basis of the highway code for a diverse society. This framework should be just as explicit as the Human Rights Act; it should be written down. The Human Rights Act itself is, in my view, too legalistic to function as a popular code - we need in addition a plain language, common sense guide that sets out what British human rights are, how we express them and how they are relevant to people's daily lives.

Coming back to Mozart, The Magic Flute - a piece of work no less complex in its construction than the Human Rights Act -would have very few fans if we all had to study the score on paper and read the libretto in German. But happily we can get all the best tunes and watch a performance on CD - or even on our iPods.  I see no reason why a Human Rights framework for a 21st century Britain can't equally be translated into everyday English, showing how it would work in real life.

This, perhaps, should be one of the CEHR's very first tasks - to develop a popular guide based on human rights principles to living together in Britain today. Let's say we used the principal language of our time - the language of film, TV, CD and video - sound plus moving images.

What might such a CD deal with?

Louise Casey, best known as the driving force behind the ASBO, this month has said that the government needs to invest in improving manners in British society. She wants to see politeness back on the streets. This week, the Commission on Integration and Cohesion launched its full report. Its chair, Darra Singh, has said that to foster community cohesion we need to teach people how to live together with mutual respect and civility.

The British human rights code would bring these suggestions together, and provide a framework for a distinctively British way of living together in a diverse society - a way of living together respectfully, graciously (to use Isaiah Berlin's phrase) and with mutual consideration. We know how to express this in combinations of words and the moving image. There is a clear need for this basic guide, which would be for everybody, and not just the few who have the ability, access and inclination to read policy documents and the law.

Last week, in a Fabian society pamphlet, Ruth Kelly and Liam Byrne renewed the call for 'earned citizenship'. In my view, and I am not alone in this, citizenship should be earned by all - the native born as well as newcomers. The British human rights code that I am proposing would give real life content to this citizenship. And it would, I believe, succeed where the government failed with its 'Life in the UK' publication to coach people for the citizenship test. 

There is another role for a popular code. In practice, when we are confronted with disputes of conflicts of culture or tradition, our human rights framework can act as the final arbiter. This will be critical for the Commission for Equality and Human Rights which from Day One will be called upon to exercise the judgement of Solomon, though I suspect that we won't be able to apply Biblical mind games. I predict that the test of our mettle as an organisation will be in a case of such a conflict or dispute, where we will have to stand up and say, for example, that you cannot both uphold your desire to force your daughter to marry a man against her will and still live within a British human rights culture. One thing - and it will be pretty clear which - will have to give.

An example of how not to adjudicate in such disputes was demonstrated in a German divorce case this year. A husband beat his wife and threatened her with murder. But because husband and wife were both from Morocco, although they married in Germany, a German divorce court judge saw no cause for alarm. Instead, the judge argued, it's a religion thing, and the wife should have expected as much when she got married.

9. Conclusion

In promoting a distinctively British human rights culture, that is framed around defence of the individual against authority on the one hand, and around building good relations on the other, the CEHR will make find itself stepping well outside the courtroom and wading into the public square, including the political parts of that square.

To be successful we will have to give human rights a resonance with the British public. We will have to show how they apply to everyone - the people we care about who are vulnerable to the heavy-handed state, the people we tend to forget about who are equally at risk, and all of us, when we use public services and when we navigate the uncharted waters of our hyper-diverse society.

To return to my earlier metaphor, we have a story which in its essence is powerful and compelling. But at present too few people can hear it much less understand it. It will be our task together to rewrite the piece as Mozart so often did, to tell a story that the British people like, in a key that inspires, and in a language that they understand, with tunes that echo their historic rhythms and whose words they can learn and sing for themselves without having to ask us the CEHR band to strike up again and again.

I am no Mozart, merely an interpreter. The Commission will be a great band, and we will do our part to present brilliant new work. We'll no doubt improvise continuously.  We will all borrow form the past and from other countries. But in the end the basic chords for a British human rights culture will come from you amongst others.

The composers of the new music of equality and human rights are the legislators, the Parliamentarians, the lawyers, the academics.  We will look to you to play your part in penning an inspiring new libretto and score for us, for the biggest new show in town - equality and human rights.

Thank you.