There is a particular kind of story that now functions as an Internet punchline across the English-speaking web. A foreign offender remains in the country because his child prefers British chicken nuggets, for example. Each case is treated as a freakish aberration — as if it’s an unfortunate misapplication of otherwise noble laws by overzealous judges or activist lawyers. Unfortunately, this is comforting nonsense. These cases are not bugs in the system. They are the system working exactly as designed.
There is a growing consensus across Europe — from Britain to Denmark to Italy — that human rights law, particularly as embodied in the European Convention on Human Rights, is being exploited to frustrate the democratic will of states to control their borders. What is striking is how quickly the debate retreats into technicalities: amend Article 8, clarify proportionality tests, rein in judicial discretion. As if a bit of legal plumbing will prevent the next chicken nugget scandal.
But the real problem is not any particular article or treaty. It is the founding absurdity of modern human rights law itself: the claim that human rights are universal and inalienable. They quite simply aren’t and we should stop pretending otherwise.
Human rights are not like oxygen or gravity — natural phenomena that exist independently of human societies. They are not discovered but are invented. They emerged from a highly specific historical and cultural environment: post-war Western Europe and North America, shaped by Christianity, the Enlightenment, liberal constitutionalism, and a shared horror at the excesses of total war. To pretend otherwise is to engage in metaphysical fantasy. For decades liberals have forced this technocratic LSD trip upon us and it needs to stop.
The language of universality flatters Western and European sensibilities. It allows us to imagine our moral intuitions as timeless truths rather than contingent products of our own civilisation. But the empirical record is devastatingly clear. Human rights have not “failed” to take root in Somalia or Afghanistan because of bad luck or insufficient funding. They have failed because they are alien concepts in societies organised around entirely different moral, legal, and social foundations. This is not a moral judgement. It is a descriptive one.
Human rights law insists on a fiction
The idea that an individual possesses enforceable rights against the collective; that the state is constrained by abstract principles rather than power, kinship, or religious authority; that law exists to protect personal autonomy rather than enforce moral conformity — these are profoundly Western ideas. They make sense in Copenhagen or Washington because they were born there. They do not naturally arise in Mogadishu, Kandahar or even my own birthplace, Belgrade.
And yet human rights law insists on a fiction: that someone arriving from a society where these ideas never existed, were never taught, and were never expected, can nonetheless claim them as an entitlement the moment they cross our borders. This is the sleight of hand at the heart of the asylum system.
Third world migrants are encouraged by lawyers, NGOs, and courts to treat human rights not as the hard-won privileges of a particular political community, but as a kind of global welfare benefit: instantly claimable, retroactively applicable, and immune to democratic revocation. The result is not compassion, but farce. And this farce is fuelling the widespread, anti-democratic rage that has taken root across the West.
Those who wish to live under Western legal and moral systems should be required to join them properly
It is therefore entirely reasonable to say what human rights law currently refuses to acknowledge: people cannot reasonably expect to enjoy rights that never existed in their own societies. Access to Western human rights is a privilege and it should be acquired in the same way as other privileges: through lawful entry, work, naturalisation, and citizenship. This is not bigotry. It is coherence.
Those who wish to live under Western legal and moral systems should be required to join them properly. That means work visas, residency requirements, and perhaps eventual citizenship after several decades — not the instantaneous lottery jackpot of a successful asylum claim, that ultimately awards the illegal trespassing across national borders. Human rights should attach to political membership, not merely to physical presence. In fact, they should be treated not as a birthright but as a privilege that can be revoked if, say, an Algerian born in Paris decides to join an Islamic terror group.
Predictably, this argument will horrify a certain class of pearl-clutching moralist. To them, any suggestion that rights are culturally contingent sounds like the march of jackboots outside their window. But it is precisely their magical thinking that has brought human rights law to the brink of popular repudiation. Voters are not rejecting human rights because they have suddenly become hungry for fascism. They are rejecting them because they have been asked to accept too many obvious absurdities for too long. When law demands that the public take a human right to chicken nugget seriously, it forfeits its own legitimacy.
The real danger, then, is not in rethinking treaties or abandoning the fiction of universality. The danger lies in clinging to a status quo that is visibly collapsing. If human rights are treated as limitless, borderless, and immune to democratic constraint, the public will eventually conclude that they are more trouble than they are worth and then discard them altogether. If that happens, it will not be the fault of sceptics or reformers. It will be the fault of those who insisted on pretending that a historically specific Western moral system was a law of nature and demanded that everyone else play along with this political fiction.
This absurdity needs to end. Yes, there are specific cases where it makes sense to extend our Western rights to outsiders but these should be exceptions rather than the rule. Western and European nations cannot be expected to save every Iranian with a sob story. We cannot allow ourselves to be the world’s premier refugee camp — which is exactly what we are right now.
Weepy progressives have already started wailing that any tweaking of human rights laws risks creating a “hierarchy of people”. This is completely disingenuous propaganda. There is no hierarchy of people. But there is a hierarchy of cultures and civilisations. Illegal migrants across the entire planet recognise this when they violate the borders of the civilised world. It’s time that we all recognised this too.
