Rights have, however, been a runaway success for academics, judges and convicts, for example, who have discovered that their sentence of imprisonment violates a whole range of their human rights, ranging from voting in elections to receiving welfare benefits. It is but one of the notable paradoxes of the world of rights that lawbreakers can demand as of right a voice in the formulation of laws which they evidently hadn't taken too seriously in the past. Nevertheless, it has been "discovered", as it were, that convicts ought not to be denied this right. It may be significant that this "discovery" has been made largely by foreign judges at the European Court of Human Rights. And this reveals a further feature of rights: they purport to be universal moral attributes independent of circumstance or tradition. But many of the rights now claimed by convicted criminals are widely recognised as absurd by those in Anglo-Saxon Common Law countries who (like me) had no official rights until an unwanted Act of Parliament was passed in Britain to equip us with these new-fangled things. Those living in the Anglosphere have had no new access of freedoms from such legislation. They already enjoyed the freedom of law, and no external bodies could then interfere with that. But the content of rights varies considerably between one legal and political tradition and another.

The result is that Britain has largely lost the protection of determining its own moral standards, and fallen under a variety of universal jurisdictions. The European Court of Human Rights has recently, for example, declared invalid, as discriminatory, the cheaper motor insurance young women get because they have fewer serious accidents than young men. These rather muddled legal authorities have become so bewitched by the idea of discrimination that they cannot, as Alasdair Palmer has pointed out, tell the difference between actuaries and Nazis.

It is a further problem with rights that there seem to be no end of them. Enthusiasts keep discovering more and more, so that in their fullness, they threaten to adumbrate a comprehensive legislative programme of "governance" that will leave very little for democratic parliaments to do. One way of life will cover us all. Thomas Pogge, a professor at the Australian National University has recently "discovered" that everyone in the world has a right not to be malnourished, which imposes a duty on the rest of the world to come up with the food for the "bottom billion". Here is an open-ended commitment whose reality must be determined by the procreative decisions of millions of people in the third world. Indeed, these acts will not even be the decision of all the people involved, since the exiguous power of women in these countries largely means that our responsibilities are at the mercy of the lusts of men. As a piece of moral thinking, not to speak of political, this is one more of the more dramatic reductiones ad absurdum of the whole idea of rights, though in its dottiness it must compete with such other absurdities as the fact that the UN Council on Human Rights long included the Libya of Colonel Gaddafi among its many freedom-loving members. Such realities of rights make it all the more remarkable that many universities have jumped upon the bandwagon by setting up research centres devoted to exploring the many aspects of the idea.