By Eric Wamanji
Eight hundreds years is a very very long time. Yet, today, the world is celebrating the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta, or simply the Great Charter!
So what the hell is this Magna…? Well, if you are a journalist, a politician, a human rights activist and you have not devoured the letter and spirit of this charter, you are just but a pretender to the throne. For its from the foundation of this ideal that the trade of the estates are buoyed.
However, to the uninitiated, this is a document, or an accord that revolutionised liberties, rights and justice, as we know them today.
Crown and law
On June 15 2012, in England, King John granted this charter that made the crown subject to the law. Kings were initially above the law and rule with iron fists. The spirit of the Magna Carta is that power should not be abused against the citizens and sought to end despotism beloved of the King.
From thence, historians note, the building blocks of the modern democracy were established. If you will to care, the American constitution borrowed heavily from the Magna Carta and so is the British Common Law.
But which King, would, so foolishly append to such a document relinquishing his raw power? Well, folks, it was not in King John’s will anyway. He had to grant this documents under duress. He was in a crisis. You see, the royal was in conflict with the so called barons, and I bet he was cornered by like a rat. King John, in Runnymede, near Windsor on 15 June 1215 acceded to the charter. It tamed his autocracy and saved him from the foray of the barons.
Here is a classical excerpt from the document:
“No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land. To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice.”
Human Rights treaties
This provided right to justice and fair trial, to all “free men” a precedent incorporated in hundreds of constitutions worldwide. It is also partly, the source of the much exhalted human rights doctrines we flaunt about town today. The US Bill of Rights of 1791 is anchored here so is in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Indeed, Eleanor Roosevelt, who chaired the committee on UNDHR so wished it could become ‘the international Magna Carta of all men everywhere.” To note also is that the European Convention on Human Rights (1950) was tethered to the Magna Carter.
To be fair, codification of human rights, had its predecessors far earlier in Cyrus the Great. Documents and historical accounts, including Biblical, show that In 539 BC, Cyrus conquered Babylon, he then freed slaves (including the Jews) and declared that all people had the right to choose their own religion and had freedom of thought and are all equal. His decrees are immortalized in the Cyrus Cylinder. Besides, in England there is also Petition of Right (1628) whose main interest was to secure human rights in law. , And lest we forget the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789).
Still, the Margna Carter is a great document by every measure. Britain has been celebrating this great contribution to modern democracy, peaking today in a series of events. #Google also has mounted a doodle to honour this day.
It is such outlier spirits that informed such thinker as John Rawls’ magnum opus, A Theory of Justice (1971) and of course the Enlightenment thinkers of the post-medieval crisis, such has John Locke (Two Treatise of Government) Jean-Jacque Rousseau ( Social Contract) who wrote extensively extolling free will, dignity and sanctity of inherent freedoms.
You see, the Magna makes the law blind of any rank or class (well, this is debatable in Kenya). It also grants citizens their irreducible freedoms not to be robbed by those in power. Still, it befuddles me as to why, Britain, where the seeds of liberties would be sowed, ended up committing barbaric atrocities against man in slave trade and colonialism.
Yet, pray, tell, why is man still under the clutches of injustices the world over, many years after our faculties opened up to rights and liberties? And just why are the sundry noise makers in parliament, the streets, and the fourth estate still pay a blind eye when injustices against man continue unabated?
Widows, taxes, land
The charter also tackled other wide-ranging issues like land ownership, taxes, and the church. In fact on taxes, it decreed that only the “general consent of the realm’ – the clergy and barons – could sanction such a levy and not the crown. And yes, it also proclaimed that a widow could not be forced to remarry against her wish.
The Carta has endured 800 good years…and more to come. Viva Magna Carta.