Written by Marco Duranti

Introduction: The symbolic force of human rights

The last half century has witnessed the ascendancy of human rights as a language of legal, moral, and political claim-making across much of the globe. The idiom of human rights has gained particular symbolic force (Neves 2007) and is regarded by some as ‘the lingua franca of moral thought’ (Ignatieff 2001, p. 53). This is in part because of its semantic flexibility. The rights attaching to the phrase human rights vary widely, as do the individuals and groups of humans who hold these rights. Human rights is what might be called a floating signifier around which competing political movements gather for disparate goals. Human rights, while enshrined as universal values codified in international texts, are a contested and unstable concept up for grabs by competing groups who use them for divergent purposes in domestic political settings.

In recent years, historians have investigated the socio-political contexts in which human rights emerged and evolved over time. A growing body of qualitative historical scholarship has challenged narratives that assumed a singular ideological lineage for the phrase human rights and critiqued interpretations that flattened its meaning and political usages (e.g., Duranti 2017). Regardless, the received scholarly wisdom continues to be that human rights has been chiefly of interest to ‘progressive’ movements mobilising in defence of subaltern and historically marginalised groups, rather than conservative political actors, at least in the context of domestic political contestations in the Global North.

To systematically test whether this thesis is applicable to contemporary British political history, I used computational methods to analyse rights-related talk in British parliamentary records (Hansard corpus). My aim was to compare the frequency with which MPs from three different political parties (Conservative, Labour, and Liberal Democrat) used the phrase human rights in parliamentary debates, as well as how these trends had fluctuated over time. Given the quantity of text in the Hansard corpus, the existing qualitative methods prevalent in the field of human rights history were inadequate. Therefore, I used new tools that permitted me to identify broader trends that could be coupled with a close textual reading.

The process

As a first step, the Sydney Informatics Hub team retrieved political speech from the ParlSpeech V2 data set (Rauh & Schwalbach 2020a), namely the British parliamentary dataset containing speeches from the House of Commons (Rauh & Schwalbach 2020b). This source data was then processed further (including conversion from RDS to CSV) to reduce the corpus size to data relevant to the discussion of rights. This process resulted in a csv file (see Figure 1).[i] This file contained information about:

• the date of the utterance (‘date’),
• the political party of the speaker (‘party’),
• the speaker name (‘speaker’),
• the relevant pattern of right/rights (‘rights’, e.g. human from human rights; people from rights of people),
• the surrounding text (‘context’),
• the number of the agenda (‘agenda_id’),
• the title of the agenda (‘agenda_title’) and
• the number of the speech within the relevant agenda (‘agenda_speechnumber’).

For example, in row 2 in Figure 1, the utterance occurred on 22 November 1988, was uttered by Neil Kinnock from the Labour party in the agenda titled First Day, which was the first agenda (0 means first in this csv), and occurs within speech 6 of that agenda. Inspecting the context column demonstrates that Kinnock mentioned the ending of the right of silence in a police station.

To explore patterns in this dataset, an analysis dashboard was created, available at https://sydney-informatics-hub.github.io/hansard-rights-data-vis/. The dashboard generally uses the same terminology as the csv in Figure 1, but uses both ‘rights’ and ‘types of rights’ to refer to the relevant identified pattern of right/rights (e.g. human from human rights; people from rights of people).

Findings

By using this new dashboard to compare the use of the phrase human rights across party lines I was able to identify several interesting trends. These included the following preliminary observations:

• MPs from opposition parties were more likely than MPs from the party in government to use the phrase human rights in Parliament. This was true regardless of whether the party affiliation was Conservative, Labour, or Liberal Democrat. An increased usage of the phrase human rights didn’t necessarily indicate that the MP had a positive sentiment toward human rights, as in cases when Conservative MPs criticised human rights courts, legislation, and treaties. But the trend does suggest that opposition MPs were more prone to draw on the language of human rights, whether for mobilisation or critique.   
• Liberal Democrats had the highest propensity to use the phrase human rights in comparison to the Labour Party and Conservative Party. Liberal Democrats had the highest proportion of unique speakers mentioning human rights per day (see Figure 2) and were more likely to use the phrase human rights at least ten times in Parliament across all but one ministry—the first Cameron ministry—when Liberal Democrats were in government. Liberal Democrats have long been associated with the defence of civil liberties and of supranational European bodies such as the European Court of Human Rights. Still, it is striking that they were less likely to utter the phrase human rights than both Conservative and Labour MPs when given ministerial responsibilities.

• Across all three party affiliations, there was a dramatic rise in the likelihood MPs would mention human rights from the first Major ministry (1990-1992) to the second Major ministry (1992-1997) and again from the second Major ministry to the first Blair ministry (1997-2001). This might be expected as the rise coincides with increased support among Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs for the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into UK domestic law, culminating in the Human Rights Act 1998 and its implementation in 2000. Unexpectedly, however, the increase in the use of the phrase human rights was much more pronounced among Conservative MPs than Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs. For example, the number of Conservative MPs mentioning human rights at least once during a ministry rose from 17.5% to 81.3% during this period, in contrast to Labour MPs (26.9% to 60.1%) and Liberal Democrat MPs (30.4% to 75%). By comparison, the number of Conservative MPs mentioning human rights at least ten times during a ministry rose from 1.9% to 22.5% during this period, a greater rise than Labour MPs (0.4% to 16.8%) but smaller than Liberal Democrat MPs (4.3% to 27.1%).
• After a decline during the subsequent Labour ministries, there was another spike during the first Cameron ministry (2010-2015), when many Conservatives pushed for the replacement of the Human Rights Act with a British Bill of Rights and intensified their criticisms of the European Court of Human Rights. Labour MPs were more likely to mention human rights at least once during this ministry than during the previous period of Labour government, suggesting again the Government-opposition role effect.

While these findings are preliminary, they already show the value of using computational methods together with my disciplinary expertise as a historian specialising in the history of human rights. Such methods are well suited to complement existing qualitative methods in the field of human rights history. They also add a new disciplinary angle to existing corpus linguistic approaches to Hansard records (e.g. von Lunen et al. 2023), including recent work on the Australian Federal Hansard (Hames et al. 2025). In addition, the cross-disciplinary collaboration with data scientists was an interesting and worthwhile endeavour in itself, aligning with my long-standing interest in Digital Humanities research.

Acknowledgments

The author acknowledges the technical assistance of Hamish Croser and Chao Sun of the Sydney Informatics Hub, a Core Research Facility of the University of Sydney, and the editorial assistance of Monika Bednarek from the Sydney Corpus Lab. Their support was made possible throughthe Language Data Commons of Australia (LDaCA). LDaCA is a co-investment partnership with the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) through the HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons (https://doi.org/10.47486/HIR001). The ARDC is enabled by the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS).

References

Duranti, Marco. The Conservative Human Rights Revolution: European Identity, Transnational Politics, and the Origins of the European Convention. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Hames, Sam, Michael Haugh, and Simon Musgrave. ‘”How is that unparliamentary?”: The metapragmatics of “unparliamentary” language in the Australian Federal Parliament’. Lingua 320: 103932 (2025): 1-24. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103932

Ignatieff, Michael. Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.

Moyn, Samuel. The Last Utopia. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010.

Neves, Marcelo. ‘The symbolic force of human rights’. Philosophy & Social Criticism 33:4 (2007): 411-444.

Rauh, Christian, and Jan Schwalbach. ‘The ParlSpeech V2 data set: Full-text corpora of 6.3 million parliamentary speeches in the key legislative chambers of nine representative democracies’. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/L4OAKN, Harvard Dataverse, V1, 2020a.

Rauh, Christian, and Jan Schwalbach. ‘Corp_HouseOfCommons_V2.rds’. The ParlSpeech V2 data set: Full-text corpora of 6.3 million parliamentary speeches in the key legislative chambers of nine representative democracies, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/L4OAKN/W2SVMF, Harvard Dataverse, V1, 2020b.

Von Lunen, Alexander, Lesley Jeffries, Fransina Stradling, Hugo Sanjurjo-González, and Paul Crossley. ‘Hansard at Huddersfield: Adapting corpus linguistic methods for non-specialist use’. International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 17:2 (2023): 25-46. https://doi.org/10.3366/ijhac.2023.0298

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[i] This is the general method to create that file from the source:

1. Each utterance is searched for two patterns using a natural language processing library (this provides part of speech information, which is useful for filtering out phrases such as “he was right to do it”:
   1. “<word> right[s]” – where <word> is a noun or adjective. This will capture “human” from “human rights” for example
   1. “right[s] of|for [the] <word>” – where <word> is a noun. This will capture “people” from “right of the people” and “rights of people” for example

Importantly, the nouns and adjectives captured were not just individual words, but noun/adjective chains that were then broken into their parts. An example is “rights of Northern Ireland people”. This phrase was turned into three entries, one each for “northern”, “ireland”, and “people”. The same process was used for pattern a and pattern b from above. This explains, inter alia, “illegal” being included as a right, e.g. “rights of illegal immigrants to due process” would produce two “rights” entries: “illegal” and “immigrants”.

• Once a match is found, a context window of 5 tokens is captured in the ‘context’ column
• Some further cleaning is applied, e.g. non ascii characters are removed from the ‘rights’ column although some infrequent errors remain. For example, the dashboard includes “ahuman” as a pattern, which only occurs once in the underlying file, with an apparent encoding error (adopt a“human rights framework).

The relevant code file is available here: https://github.com/Sydney-Informatics-Hub/HASS-51-Human-Rights-Hansard/blob/main/hansard/hansard_spacy.py