The position that the US constitution applies to the UK is a pretty crazy piece of legal maximalism in the first place, but there is plenty of US caselaw that it doesn't apply equally to non-US nationals even within the US.
I'm not meaning to imply that the USC applies to anyone other than US citizens from a legal standpoint. Not only am I not a lawyer, but I'm meaning to draw a distinction between legal rights and human rights in this context.
I'm saying that the rights codified in the USC are inalienable rights. The US government isn't granting the freedom of speech, and it can't take it away. The right exists because you're a human being.
The fact that a country doesn't recognize it as a right doesn't change its status.
As an American happy to live in a country with all our protected freedoms, there are some parts of the Constitution that other reasonable countries don't agree with, and that's fine. There are other cultures with other value systems and they're no less valid.
(1) Freedom of Assembly, part of our 1st Amendment, is one example.
A French court recently decided a protest in Paris could not take place. The court rationale was that a previous protest a few years ago in the same area on the same issue led to violence and destruction of property.
The French Constitution allows freedom of speech, but not freedom of assembly, and Americans are often confused by that. The freedom to write and say what you want does not equate to the freedom to protest in the streets. Not allowing freedom of assembly would have saved many lives in the protests that have swept the US, though potentially at the cost of slower social progress.
(2) Right to bear arms, our 2nd amendment, is another example.
The vast majority of first-world countries don't agree that the right to bear arms is an inalienable human right in today's society.
As Americans, we may prefer the added protection against government tyranny and our personal ability to protect ourselves and our belongings. Unarguably, however, it comes at the cost of mass shootings, and additionally, though many factors are responsible for our uniquely high homicide rate, easy availability of firearms certainly does not help to curb it.
--- All this to say, many of our protected rights have clear, substantial disadvantages. It's not our place to tell every other country in the world how to operate.
> Not allowing freedom of assembly would have saved many lives in the protests that have swept the US, though potentially at the cost of slower social progress.
The US supreme court has established that the government can't regulate the content of speech, but the government is in its right to regulate the time, place and manner of speech. [0]
So it is very much a thing in the US and has been enforced plenty of times, for example during Occupy and even during BLM when protests were just declared as "riots" to then crack down on them with the full force of a militarized police arresting thousands of people [1].
> even during BLM when protests were just declared as "riots" to then crack down on them with the full force of a militarized police arresting thousands of people
Many Americans actually died in these events in addition to dangerous fires (with people still inside buildings!) and random acts of violence, so the riot characterization has at least in some cases been fair. It makes sense thousands of people would be arrested when hundreds of crimes have occurred.
The difference in the US is that these events could not be stopped from occurring, and people were not immediately arrested and water cannoned and so forth by police. It was only after the event grew and escalated and changed in nature.
That is where France differs — a protest can, from the beginning, be declared unable to occur, and police respond to it accordingly.
This is not at all to say that these events were all wrong or created with ill intent, but that there is a clear advantage and disadvantage to the right to freedom of assembly in the US.
> That is where France differs — a protest can, from the beginning, be declared unable to occur, and police respond to it accordingly.
I think you are misunderstanding what all of this actually means: The US government doesn't just have to tolerate protests anywhere anytime.
It is in its right to deem certain times, places and forms of expression as not valid, the only thing it can't regulate is the content of the expression.
So you are free to protests for whatever you want, but you are not free to do it whenever and wherever you want, the authorities have the last word on that, regardless of any violence or crimes happening.
I understand what you're referring to, but was aiming to explain the difference between the US and France in a more approachable way. The US could block a protest from occurring, but the legal basis would be much tougher than that in France (it's more protected in the US).
In the US, a court won't simply forbid a protest ahead of time because the issue was protested several years ago in the same neighborhood and it led to a riot.
> The French Constitution allows freedom of speech, but not freedom of assembly, and Americans are often confused by that.
It is a subtle issue, but under French law assembling and protesting is covered under free speech, which is a human right.
However, another principle is that all rights are limited when they are in conflict with other people’s fundamental rights, one of them being to live in peace. So in case of protests they have to register beforehand to ensure that there would be some police to prevent violence. That’s the theory anyway. They are not quite as murderous as American policemen, but French ones can also be violent and heavy handed.
For the same reason some protests can be forbidden. Usually, it is very difficult as the local government needs to demonstrate a significant risk of unacceptable violence. It is easier these days (in the last 2 decades or so) since there are “exceptional” measures in force to limit terrorism. And of course now there are public health restrictions because of COVID.
Right to bear arms, our 2nd amendment, is another example.
From what I've read about this arcane piece of legislation, some historians have suggested it stemmed from the fear of slave owners who believed that freed black man may choose to exact revenge on them and they feared that others in their country, who favoured abolition of slavery and criticised them for owning slaves, may not stand with them to offer protection against such revenge attacks. Thus, many spoke in favour of the right to bear arms, stoking fears of a future conflict between the white man and the black man.
I am not an American, so I may indeed be mistaken. But the reasoning sounded logical to me - The whole civil war in the US happened because the confederates differed with other Americans on the question of white supremacy and the abolishment of slavery in the USA. For these secessionists, the enslaved blacks and the Americans who supported freeing them were the enemies.
USA also allows and disallows protests at various places and times. And they have just legislated new additional laws about that.
But I give you that personal guns being framed as anti goverment tyranny is profoundly us thing. I find out odd also because those guns tend to be stockpiled by pretty authoritarian groups and very rarely by civil rights groups.
I think a lot of people in the US would say that rights like freedom of speech ought to be available to everyone, everywhere in the world.
But if you ask them whether 4th-8th amendment rights should extend to detainees at Guantanamo Bay; or whether separation of church and state should be demanded of our Israeli friends; or whether the Queen should be deposed as a tyrant; you would find a lot less support.
These two points of view aren't contradictory, the Constitution is very clear that it does not grant anybody rights but it is less clear about whose rights they can infringe on.
Yes, that's the usual human rights rationale but it's practically a theological one - that the rights have always existed and exist even if you can't see or action them.
Interestingly ECHR doesn't bother to define what a right is or where they come from, leaving the implicit position being simple legal realism that the rights exist because this document says they do and the parties agreed to it. https://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Archives_1950_Convention_...
The other point of course is that even if you recognise a pre-government system of human rights, it is reasonable to apply exceptions. For example, the right to free speech is reasonably curtailed when the person speaking is ordering a lackey to commit murder. Most countries recognise some level of intrinsic human rights, but they all handle these exceptions slightly differently.
It's not that the UK is dastardly in violating this person's right to privacy because it doesn't think the rights are worth upholding. It's just that the UK has formulated a particular set of reasonable circumstances where it is alright to violate the right to privacy, and has reasoning behind each of them. The US has a different set of formulated reasonable circumstances where it is alright to violate the right to privacy that much of Europe is pretty horrified about. Both sides being horrified at the borderline areas of the other is not surprising.
> Interestingly ECHR doesn't bother to define what a right is or where they come from, leaving the implicit position being simple legal realism that the rights exist because this document says they do and the parties agreed to it.
That’s a strange take. It is basically a rewriting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. It even says so right there in the preamble. And it’s a law, part of an international treaty, not a history book. So where the origins of these rights are is beside the point and a legal description is not really surprising.
https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...
https://guides.ll.georgetown.edu/c.php?g=592919&p=4170926 (which reminds me of the US failure to ratify certain international conventions under which it provides weaker rights)