Shamus's human rights under ICESCR

"My experience of human rights as a Nacken, a Scottish Gypsy Traveller, and a victim of the Tinker Experiments, is that the rights that are on paper, I’m not experiencing. So, they don't mean very much to me at all.

I'm not enjoying an adequate standard of living. There's no continuous improvement of conditions, food, clothing, housing. The right to health, the right to marriage, the right to found a family, to participate in cultural life, to freedom of movement, everything. That's gone by the wayside.

In the seventies, when times were a bit more relaxed, we’d go into a gelly (tent) with a lum (chimney) protruding from it. You had a raconteur, and everybody would lie around the fire and listen. I remember crawling into the tent and the guy telling stories and I was just lying there in fits of laughter.

So that was one element of cultural life, which is a right under Article 15 of ICESCR. But we’re being denied those rights, and the local authority plans to impose Liaison Officers on our sites, against the wishes of the residents, further inhibiting these rights.

You know, I'm sitting here on a Tinker Experiment site. We were forcibly assimilated.

We've got an apology now, but there's been no attention to the personal injuries suffered by the victims over decades.

It's like being in a cultural void between settled society and Gypsy Traveller society. So, we were rejected by both. You know, in no man's land and nobody wanted to talk to you because of the stigma of being in the experiment; segregated and separated out from society in rudimentary living conditions.

Human rights just have not been respected. Having trained in human rights, I was then seeing it: there's a violation, there's a violation, this is an infringement. That's when it really hits home. Sometimes, I feel like I’m being punished for speaking up as a human rights defender.

I mean, I'm living in a caravan with four broken windows, a broken skylight, it’s been vandalised, no running water, no electricity, no wastewater, full of mould and damp.
I've been paying council tax for that. I get the darkest, most menial work in the community that nobody else wants, despite the fact that I've got postgraduate qualifications.

There was a paper from Boyle and Hughes that identified a seismic gap in Scotland when it came to protection mechanisms for the enjoyment of economic, social and cultural rights.[i] And that’s what I’m seeing – they’re either inadequate or non-existent."

This is an excerpt from the SHRC's State of the Nation 2025 report on economic, social and cultural rights in Scotland. . Four people from across Scotland have shared their stories in this report, the stories show how all human rights are indivisible and interdependent. ESC rights touch on every part of our daily lives and often have an impact on one another, in ways that the experiences of Shamus, Anne, Derek and Nada show us.