Supreme Court Judgement:
Scottish Gov Named Person Scheme
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Judgment (PDF)
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Press summary (PDF)
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Judgment on BAILII (HTML version)
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"totalitarian"
Mainstream Media has headlined the word "totalitarian".
The immediate context is Para 73 (pages 32, 33, my emphasis):
73. This represents the detailed working out, for children, of the principle established in article 16(3) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and article 23(1) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights that “the family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the state”. There is an inextricable link between the protection of the family and the protection of fundamental freedoms in liberal democracies. The noble concept in article 1 of the Universal Declaration, that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights” is premised on difference. If we were all the same, we would not need to guarantee that individual differences should be respected. Justice Barak of the Supreme Court of Israel has put it like this (in El-Al Israeli Airlines Ltd v Danielowitz [1992-4] IsrLR 478, para 14):
“The factual premise is that people are different from one another, ‘no person is completely identical to another’ … Every person is a world in himself. Society is based on people who are different from one another. Only the worst dictatorships try to eradicate these differences.”Individual differences are the product of the interplay between the individual person and his upbringing and environment. Different upbringings produce different people. The first thing that a totalitarian regime tries to do is to get at the children, to distance them from the subversive, varied influences of their families, and indoctrinate them in their rulers’ view of the world. Within limits, families must be left to bring up their children in their own way. As Justice McReynolds, delivering the Opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States famously put it in Pierce v Society of Sisters 268 US 510 (1925), 534-535:
“The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”
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