'To have a new vision of the future, it has always been first necessary to have new vision of the past.' Historian Theodore Zeldin
There is a pressing need to have a new vision of the future of human rights and it naturally follows that is necessary first to have a new vision of its past.
We feed that vision by telling the story of how the European Convention on Human Rights grew amongst the evidence of the wasteland created by the Nazis, and through the words of the leading Nazis at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. Our storyteller David Maxwell Fyfe was one of two ‘artisans’ of the Convention having spent a year as a prosecutor at Nuremberg.
We are telling the story to commemorate the Convention in its 75th anniversary year, to celebrate the universal protections for all people bestowed by the Convention, and to build a barricade against those who support withdrawal.
David often quoted his countryman Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun who wrote:
'I said I knew a very wise man ...(who) believed if a man were permitted to make all the ballads he need not care who should make the laws of a nation, and we find that most of the ancient legislators thought that they could not well reform the manners of any city without the help of a lyric, and sometimes of a dramatic poet’.
In his speeches and writings David constantly conjures songs and poetry in his speeches and writings. This is why we are confident that a song cycle is the right way to awaken the new vision of the past: David’s words of inspiration set alongside the words that inspired him, set by Sue Casson in DREAMS OF PEACE & FREEDOM.
Andrew Fletcher has been widely paraphrased as:
‘Let me write the songs of the people and I care not who makes their laws’.
We are calling this year long commemoration and celebration of ECHR SONGS OF THE PEOPLE. Singing the songs will feed a new vision of the past And we know that if it comes to it, singing will prove, just as it did in the Baltic, peaceful, overwhelming and sure in the face of withdrawal from the ECHR.
