This is an important issue, taken up also in The Times. Ms Phillips has set it out most fully here and especially in her concluding reminder that although this travesty of a court is NOT an EU body it remains a condition of membership of the EU that we should be a signatory to the European Human Rights Convention. Whether or not this means subjecting the country to the ECHR Court is a moot point which politicians are mulling over right now! Putting right this travesty of justice, however, remains an urgent task. One person's human rights is another person's loss of human rights
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6.4.09
At last! A judge speaks up for British laws but when will we wake up to the REAL folly of human rights?
MELANIE PHILLIPS Now he tells us! One of this country's top judges has torn into the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Lord Hoffmann, the second most senior Law Lord, has questioned the court's constitutional legitimacy, ridiculed its judgments and said it should get its nose out of our national affairs. Given the fact that human rights law has effectively become a secular religion for the higher judiciary, this is what you might call a flying wig moment. Some of us, after all, have been saying for years what Lord Hoffmann has now proclaimed. But before anyone gets carried away with elation that common sense has at last broken out among the judges, it should be realised that these comments stop well short of tackling the real problem. Certainly, Lord Hoffmann lobbed some well-aimed hits at the Strasbourg court, saying it had gone beyond the boundaries of its own jurisdiction and that it should not be allowed to intervene in this way in the detail of domestic law. He ridiculed the intellectual sloppiness of its rulings and the absurdity of deeming political or economic matters to be 'human rights' issues. As he scoffed, what possible business is it of the Strasbourg judges to decide, for example, whether the elected government of the United Kingdom has struck the right balance concerning night flights at Heathrow? And as he asked, since the actual application of 'universal' human rights varies from country to country, what is the point of the Strasbourg court at all? The court does actually provide some modest leeway to individual countries. But as Lord Hoffmann said, it has nevertheless been unable to resist the temptation to impose uniformity and effectively lay down 'a federal law of Europe'. He also ridiculed its legitimacy, claiming that the judges are elected by a committee chaired by a Latvian politician - on which the UK representatives are a Labour politician with a trade union background and no legal qualifications and a Conservative politician who was called to the Bar in 1972 but has never actually practised law. Amen to all of that. It is, indeed, grotesque that unelected European judges - some of whom do not even come from countries adhering to the rule of law - should lay down what we can or cannot do. But the Strasbourg court was set up in 1959. So why has Lord Hoffmann only now realised it is wrong for European judges to interfere with the right of individual countries to live according to the laws passed by their own democratically elected governments? A clue might possibly be that the law lord - whose previous five minutes of fame occurred when he failed to declare an interest in Amnesty International while hearing the extradition case against Chilean dictator General Pinochet in which Amnesty was a party - is shortly to retire and therefore feels able finally to speak out. But if he's always thought this way, then it's a pretty poor show that he's gone along with this travesty all these years. For this country has seen its laws and values turned inside out because of the obeisance paid to the rulings of the European human rights court. In some cases, these have unilaterally challenged moral norms without public opinion even being consulted, and have undermined concepts such as family life, truth, social order, citizenship and law itself. So two cheers for Lord Hoffmann - certainly not the full hurrah, because he has stopped well short of following his own argument to its logical conclusion. He has no problem with the Human Rights Convention, nor with Britain's Human Rights Act; he objects only to the Strasbourg court. But the issue is much deeper than how the European judges have behaved. The real problem lies with human rights law itself. The liberties of this country traditionally rested on the fact that rights were not codified but grew out of English common law. As a result, everything was permitted unless it was expressly prohibited. Once codified into statute law, however, rights became dependent on what the courts said they were. So, far from expanding our liberties human rights law has diminished them. The justification is that human rights are universal principles to which no reasonable person could object. But the fact is that these are all abstract rights which have to be balanced against other rights. So these 'universal' principles are actually the product of the highly subjective prejudices and whims of the judges who conduct this trade-off process. And forget Latvians or legally unqualified trade unionists at Strasbourg - our own judges operate human rights law through a highly ideological and even dictatorial prism. Lord Bingham, the former senior Law Lord, actually declared that the Human Rights Convention existed to protect vulnerable minorities against the majority. So majority opinion, it seemed, was essentially illegitimate and the judiciary would use human rights law to do it down. As a result, it has been used as a judicial battering ram by those determined to up-end this country's core values. The police and even the security service have been paralysed by the fear of damaging the rights of one 'grievance group' or another. Christians have come under the human rights cosh for expressing a preference for heterosexual couples to adopt children. Most egregiously of all, human rights law reduced asylum and immigration policy to chaos and destroyed this country's control over its own borders. This was the result of the uniquely zealous way in which English judges interpreted Strasbourg's rulings against torture, making it impossible to deport suspected terrorists to any country suspected of abusing human rights. No less devastating to the fabric of British society, the human rights culture galvanised special interest groups to make endless demands on the basis that these were 'rights' enshrined in law. This created in turn a burgeoning industry of human rights lawyers and - despite acknowledging the ultimate supremacy of Parliament - effectively transferred much political power from Parliament to the courts. The widespread public anger all this has caused has provoked first the Tories and then the Government into loose talk about reforming human rights law. Ministers prattle fatuously about a new law of 'rights and responsibilities' . The Tories - who have rushed to embrace Lord Hoffmann's criticisms as their own - talk no less absurdly about a new British bill of rights which would repatriate human rights law from Strasbourg to Britain. But this is nonsense, since as a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights Britain would remain bound by Strasbourg's rulings - the very thing Lord Hoffmann has denounced. There are two reasons why politicians are squirming in this way over reform of human rights law. First, they don't want to be portrayed as abolishing human rights. And second, they can't tinker with this law without repudiating the Human Rights Convention - and although the Convention has separate origins from the European Union, no country can be a member of the EU unless it is also a Convention signatory. To some of us, of course, that is precisely why we should leave the EU, in order to restore our powers of self-government and democracy as expressed through our own laws. Without facing up to that fact, all the huffing of Lord Hoffmann and puffing of politicians about the iniquities and imbecilities of human rights law will fail to right our culture of human wrongs.
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