ABSTRACT
Human rights regulate every aspect of the criminal justice system and no lawyer, probation worker, police officer, prison guard or any other criminal justice professional can ignore them. The Loader and Sparks analysis is a paean for social democracy and though it seems a reasonable call for more enlightened governance it seems also rather unfocused in seeing human rights as totalising and undifferentiated at the macro and atomic levels. The Armada threatened to destroy the life of the nation, not by loss of life in battle, but by subjecting English institutions to the rule of Spain and the Inquisition. The disaster that the world witnessed in 1945, in the wake of the Second World War, was assuaged by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and a resolution to uphold human dignity as the highest value in the affairs of men and women and of states.
