The following is from a speech from the late Rt Hon Lord Bingham of Cornhill, former Master of the Rolls, Lord Chief Justice and Senior Law Lord who in a speech in 2008 asked who would seek to remove or weaken such fundamental rights as the right not to be subjected to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, the right to liberty, the right to a fair trial? He then said:
Which of these rights, I ask, would we wish to discard?
Are any of them trivial, superfluous, unnecessary?
Are any them un-British?
There may be those who would like to live in a country where these rights are not protected, but I am not of their number.
Human rights are not, however, protected for the likes of people like me — or most of you. They are protected for the benefit above all of society's outcasts, those who need legal protection because they have no other voice — the prisoners, the mentally ill, the gipsies, the homosexuals, the immigrants, the asylum-seekers, those who are at any time the subject of public obloquy.
And now we see human rights under threat. And it is not those who are proposing the end of their protection that need worry. They, like Lord Bingham, would expect no consequence from the change. But the rightly identified those who do need to fear. Which is why it is right to say that this proposal is ethically wrong.
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Grayling’s document admits that the European Convention on Human Rights “is an entirely sensible statement of the principles which should underpin any modern democratic nation”.
Yet our Lord Chancellor does not think that citizens should be able to rely on those rights to protect themselves against the power of the state – that is, to protect themselves against the unlawful actions of politicians and bureaucrats. Like many in power, the rule of law seems to be too inconvenient for him.
These Conservative proposals are shameful.
Isn’t the argument here that there is nothing wrong with Human Rights Legislation, but there has been legislative creep whereby more and more things fall into its scope, but obviously nothing ever comes out of it. I am sure we can all think of things that we think should be protected and aren’t, and other things that are protected when we think they shouldn’t be.
Broad principles are a great idea, but who knows where they will lead. Don’t get me wrong I actually like the idea of squashing the state’s power in this way, but I can see why people might object. Given a couple of hundred years who knows where things may end up. In that respect I am reminded of the US constitution and the “right to bear arms”, surely something that was never intended to be used in the way it is now.
As I understand it the proposal is to have human rights in UK legislation, but to be able to ignore the decisions made at EU level. Although surely those decisions would always be seen as persuasive even if not binding.
@ Michael,
Sorry, but this what I can only call complacent view of what the Tories have in mind as regards repealing the Human Rights Act, and re-stating in new terms the relationship between the UK and the EU. It is all made to sound SO reasonable – clawing back rights from an over-mighty European Court, and re-instating the power and supremacy of our own Supreme Court.
However, we have Lord Bingham’s arguments set out above, but more currently than that we have these two points.
1. The real scope of the planned legislation – as set out here: http://jackofkent.com/2014/10/exclusive-tory-proposals-for-bill-of-rights/
Please note the KEY bullet point in this – and I quote –
“Balance rights and responsibilities. People who do not fulfil their responsibilities in society should not be able to claim so-called “qualified rights” in their defence in a court of law.”
This constitutes a gate wide enough to drive a Panzer division through, allowing a Government to define just who does not “fulfil their responsibilities in society”.
I would ask you to note that the Tory proposal is for “a new British Bill of Rights and Responsibilities”, which I would read as “Rights for their chums = those who pass the test of being “one of us”, and Responsibilities for everyone else.
2. Secondly, right on time — to show you JUST how untrustworthy our Government is — here’s a REAL example of why they want to scrap the Human Rights Act.
https://kittysjones.wordpress.com/2014/10/02/the-lord-chancellor-is-dismantling-the-rule-of-law/
You REALLY couldn’t make it up if you tried, and taken together with Grayling’s assault on Legal Aid, access to the law, and political interference (privatizing not only prisons, but the Probation Service) I really would not expect it to be long into post-2015 Tory Government to find active politic interference in the appointment, and later the oversight, of the judiciary, resulting in a totally managed society, in which the only law is the rule of whim and arbitrariness and “who know whom”.
I repeat what I have said – ad nauseam, for which I apologize – the generation long strategy of the New Right, starting with Thatcher, is the re-instatement of a feudal society in which only the “Barons” have rights (and access to streams of taxation), and everyone else has duties, including the duty to pay tax = exactly the situation in pre-1789 France.
You may criticize Labour and the two Ed’s (as I have often done so), but we’d better get behind then, and see they win, echoing Benjamin Franklin’s advice to his fellow rebels against the Crown “We’d better all hang together, or we shall surely hang separately.”
I thought the best point was made by a man I much admire, Ken Clarke.
The principles are agreed as sound even by the most extreme of the Tories, certainly by Grayling. Their problem is with a few extreme examples.
Extreme examples shouldn’t ever result in legislative changes. “Hard cases make bad law”.
I’m not, necessarily, 100% happy that a decision is reached that a hard-core paedophile should be able to draw compensation because he was refused an electric blanket in Wandsworth, or some such, but does it matter really?
The Govt aren’t being driven by any societal need, they are being driven by the hysteria of certain tabloid newspapers.
Grayling needs to catch on to himself.
You have it right tere, Eriugenius. There is no system and no law which will produce perfect outcomes all the time. There will always be some outcomes of the law which are wrong or plain daft. Using these extreme cases as a basis for decison making will not make anything better.
But should not the UK decide its own Human Rights? Why is it that Europe is a better judge of those rights? I thought the Judiciary was the check on the Legislature.
Is there a problem with ours? Can’t imagine, say, the USA asking a foreign country to determine American rights.And I gather Germany need not, in the last instance, follow European Human Rights rulings.
The whole readon we ( yes, us, the UK) created this court wax to prevent the abuses seen before and during WW2 where IT was clear national authority is not enough
As it is clear if may not be with regard to the abuses planned by the Conservatives
We already have restrictions on freedom if speech (which I am forced to consider)
How much worse will it get?
(1) The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Strasbourg is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the EU; it is an institution of the Council of Europe, which has many more members than the EU (including Russia!), and to which the UK has belonged for very much longer than it has to the Common Market/European Communities/European Union. (2) The European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR) was agreed to a long time ago, and signed up to a long time ago – again, well before the UK had anything to do with the EU, and even before the Treaty of Rome was signed by the original Six! Winston Churchill was instrumental in getting it put together. (3) The European Court of Justice, which IS an institution of the EU, makes judgments on EU law, and has to take account of rulings of the ECtHR, but the two institutions are ENTIRELY separate. Conflating them is a deliberate piece of misdirection and propaganda, designed to prejudice anti-EU public opinion against the ECtHR and the Convention.
Repealing the Human Rights Act is one thing; but for the Tories to do everything they say they want to do, the only way they can do it is by withdrawing from the ECHR, which entails withdrawal from the Council of Europe, and that, in turn, entails repudiation of the Treaty of Lisbon and withdrawal from the EU – since signature and ratification of the Convention are a sine qua non of EU membership, and there are no member states of the EU that are not also members of the Council of Europe. The ‘In/Out’ Referendum Cameron is promising would be a dead letter, as the Government would have already taken irretrievable steps which would mean the UK’s expulsion from the EU. They can deny this as much as they like, but people like Dominic Grieve, QC, and Ken Clarke, QC, know that it is the truth. But their fellow Tories are just not in any mood to listen to them.
The Party is ignoring its wiser elders
Richard, I know you like your Venn diagrams, so here is one that starkly illustrates where the UK would be if we followed these ludicrous proposals:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/ampp3d/one-echr-diagram-explains-exactly-4371327
There have been so many excoriating critiques of the Tories’ plans, exposing the lies and the dangers therein; but it is worrying how well this plays to the galleries in some parts of this country.
Very good