Tories target European Court of Human Rights

Several decisions by the Strasbourg Court have particularly upset Tories. Above, party leader David Cameron addresses the Conservative partys annual conference earlier this month. Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg

In the rush by the Tory Party right to outdo Ukip in proving its anti-European credentials the target has moved beyond the tyrannical EU to Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights.

Worryingly, as the assault on the court not only threatens to undermine its standing as the primary human rights standard-setting body in what are still some slightly constitutional states in eastern Europe, but may threaten our own Belfast agreement.

In part the Tory obsession is just because anything beginning with euro is anathema, in part, a exceptionalist sense that British justice is intrinsically superior and does not need lessons from foreigners. Beg to differ, mlud.

Which all makes strangely ironic the proposals by the party to repudiate the convention on human rights if which is most unlikely the 47-member-state Council of Europe does not allow the UK to ignore those of the courts binding rulings that dont suit it. The court and convention, after all, were largely products of British/Winston Churchills post-war desire to bind wayward Europeans into a legal rights order that came up to British standards.

And the rights defined in the convention were those that suited a particularly conservative outlook. As Nick Cohen noted in the Observer, the drafters of the convention on human rights, including David Maxwell Fyfe, a prosecutor at Nuremberg and himself a Tory MP, also had very much in mind that it would act as a protection against the socialism of Clement Attlees 1945 Labour government as much as against the communism of Joseph Stalins Soviet Union, and it shows. No question of social rights.

Several decisions by the Strasbourg court have particularly upset Tories. It ruled Britains ban on prisoners voting unlawful, that whole-life sentences should be subject to review,and that Abu Qatada, accused of terrorist offences, should not be deported to Jordan without guarantees about evidence based on torture. Further back there were also Irish-related findings that British troops were primed to kill in Gibraltar and the prohibition on interrogation techniques used on suspects interned in Northern Ireland.

Tories insist that existing European rights will be incorporated into a new British bill of rights. All that will change is that English judges will no longer have to follow the rulings of the then merely advisory court. If that means the same end result, as Cohen asks, what is the point? If it were only so simple . . .

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Tories target European Court of Human Rights