It would be a "political disaster" if the United Kingdom pulled out of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), according to the Court’s President, Judge Dean Spielmann.
Indeed, Judge Spielmann went so far as to claim that, “A decision of [the] court must be executed. If a decision is not executed this is a violation of the rule of law which is a basic principle of any democracy.”
As the British voice of contention grows against the rising tide of EU bureaucratic intrusion into UK domestic affairs, we see yet another European institution flexing its muscles like some medieval monarch seeking to quash an uprising. We need to remind the Union, however, that sovereignty rests with independent member states.
I cannot overlook the irony, therefore, in an unelected, unknown and unaccountable European bureaucrat lecturing Great Britain on its democratic responsibilities. It is a bit like Ed Miliband opposing every welfare reform measure introduced by this Government and then saying that the welfare system needs reforming – the irony is not lost.
For UK courts, the common law has always been creative, but it has always been subject to being overridden by a statute or other legislation. There is no democratic oversight or accountability that creates that check with the Strasbourg court.
For years politicians and the legal establishment have failed to question our membership of the ECHR – but how does the UK benefit?
One of Crawley’s MEP’s, Dan Hannan, has noted that some individuals have certainly benefited. IRA terrorists have won a number of cases. Illegal immigrants regularly reach for the Convention to overturn repatriation orders. Prisoners have used it to secure their right to have twigs in their cells for use in pagan rituals and access to fertility treatment. And, of course, lawyers have done tremendously well out of it: whole chambers have sprung up, deriving their livelihoods from the growing corpus of human rights jurisprudence.
For the country as a whole, however, the balance is surely negative. It is hardly as though we suffer from a massive breakdown of civic freedoms from which only a foreign court can rescue us. The ECHR degrades our democracy without enhancing our liberty.
I am pleased that this Government, in spite of the ECHR and some of its rulings such as forcing sovereign member states to give prisons the ‘human right’ to vote in elections, is formulating a Justice policy that emphasises the victims’ rights rather than those of criminals. The Ministry of Justice is putting victims first and giving them a stronger voice in the Criminal Justice System by improving the Victims' Code, introducing pre-sentence Restorative Justice and tackling reoffending so that there are fewer victims.
Personally, I will continue to push in Parliament for the UK to leave the ECHR (and the associated significant costs) and to replace it with a British Bill of Rights.
Henry Smith MP