Former Bishop of Monmouth and Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Williams paid a major return visit to Monmouth, last Tuesday November 29.

He had been invited back by the Monmouthshire Group of Amnesty International.

In 1998, Lord Williams planted a tree on Chippenham Mead to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

His return marked the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration next year.

Lord Williams met with a small group of Amnesty members to rededicate the tree, which is becoming a significant local landmark.

He then moved on to address an Amnesty International Public Meeting in the Blake Theatre which had been generously made available by Monmouth School.

Taking as his theme the Human Rights Crisis at Home and Abroad, Lord Williams saw the application of human rights as being a matter of shared humanity and improved wellbeing, it was wrong to see human rights primarily as a shopping list of things that we were entitled to claim for ourselves.

On the contrary the Universal Declaration of Human Rights provided a framework of basic rights that we have to fight for on behalf of others.

He dismissed the suggestion that the reduction of rights for certain groups of people could be justified if this could be said to bring benefit to society as a whole. On the contrary; all our rights are diminished if the rights of others are abused.

Nor was it legitimate to say that human rights abuses could be justified on the grounds that they were consistent with local culture. If we ourselves would not submit to an abuse such as female genital mutilation it is right that we should criticize regimes that permitted it.

In Lord Williams’ view there was no justification for the proposed Bill of Rights which would do away with the 1998 Human Rights Act and undermine the European Convention and Court of Human Rights. There was no way that this could be said to be of benefit to the British people.

In the worldwide economic crisis there was a great danger of alienation and the breakdown of the social compact as more and more people felt increasingly ‘left behind’ or disadvantaged.

The fallout from this could all too easily be a rise in autocracy, the polarisation of society and the scapegoating of certain groups.

During an extended discussion, many members of the public, including a number of students from local schools, raised questions on a range of issues including the position of the LGBTQ+ community and migrant workers’ rights in Qatar, the proposed deportation of refugees to Rwanda, the position of Palestinians in the Israeli Occupied Territories and a woman’s right to control their own bodies.

The meeting was chaired by Hugo Perks, who said: “It was most heartening to see young people in the audience and to hear the penetrating questions that they raised.

‘‘They are the generation who will be taking up the momentous battle for human rights.”