First rant - human rights
OK, well, this is definitely a bad sign. Rather than working, I'm looking through the news and commenting on it on Live Journal. But my argument is that this minimises the risk of other people actually having to listen to me going on about this sort of thing in person, and news about the Human Rights Act panders perfectly to my own obsessions anyway, so here we go ...
The HRA's been in the news a fair bit lately - Labour (who as the party who enacted the damn thing might have known better) and the Conservatives have both decided to pick on this piece of legislation as the reason why we allegedly can't protect ourselves from foreign murderers/rapists/terrorists/evildoers [delete as appropriate].
Essentially, they object to the idea of an absolute ban on deporting people to countries where they might be tortured or abused; and especially given the government's attempts to negotiate Memoranda of Understanding with such well-known and trusty, liberal regimes as Algeria, Jordan and Egypt, they feel that we need to be able to evict such individuals regardless. Labour have been talking, albeit vaguely and with no particular timescale, about the possibility of legislating to make judges "balance public safety with individual rights", while the Tories have been talking about reforming or repealing the Human Rights Act outright.
Both of them seem to be ignoring the tiny little detail that, even if we amended the HRA, repealed it or put it under a parliamentary fatwa, we'd still be part of the European Convention on Human Rights. People would still be perfectly within their rights to appeal to the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg (nothing to do with the European Union, incidentally), calling on the Convention in its full form. It would certainly slow down the decision-making process and make it more expensive (one way of spending money saved by cutting legal aid I suppose ...), but it wouldn't affect the basic issue. So are we going to withdraw from the Convention, partially or wholly? We would then have the distinction of being, along with Belarus and Kazakhstan, the only European states banned from the Council of Europe because our human rights record wasn't up to scratch. Which I suppose would arguably make us tough on crime, but I'm not sure how a photo line-up of Blair/Cameron and Lukashenko would look ...
The HRA and appeals to Strasbourg before it have actually done a lot of good in Britain, and it would be nice to hear people talk about that a bit more. Rape victims, severely disabled individuals, same-sex partners and indeed Prince Charles have all been helped by use of the Convention, either in British or European courts. Unsurprisingly, we don't tend to hear as much about them as we do about dangerous criminals allegedly roaming our streets thanks to the Human Rights Act, but these groups do exist. Quite frankly, leaving Prince Charles aside, they're rather larger in number. And in the most famous case in 2004, where the House of Lords ruled that the treatment of 11 foreign nationals - who were detained without trial, without seeing the evidence against them, without even knowing the charges against them and with minimal review of their detention by SIAC, which met in secret when much of the evidence was considered - we had to rely on the Human Rights Act to lay down what a constitutional government's limits were. Judges can't strike down Acts of Parliament - they can only state that they are incompatible with the rights to which Britain is signed up - but personally, I'm rather glad to have an independent watchdog to suggest that, just possibly, if you're going to lock someone up for an indeterminate period of time a reason and a trial should be involved somewhere along the line.
The boring, undramatic response to things like problems with parole violators would be to actually make systems work properly. There's no evidence that the release of Anthony Rice, or of foreign offenders, had anything to do with the Human Rights Act - the problem in both cases was a very simple one of human error, on the part of the parole board and the Home Office respectively. The HRA already provides that rights may often be limited in the interests of public safety. And given that leaving the Council of Europe would probably make EU membership pretty untenable too, the most we could do by repealing the Human Rights Act would be to make individuals appeal to Strasbourg again.
But it's still important for two reasons; first, repealing or weakening the HRA will, to a greater or lesser extent, take an important part of justice - the weighing up of rights in a free society - and contract it out to Strasbourg. One of the key arguments for the HRA in the first place was that it would "bring rights home" and allow British, rather than (mostly) continental, judges to rule on these issues. The second is that it's part of a wider assault on the idea of human rights. These sorts of announcements make the political weather and help to shape attitudes, and we need a culture of commitment to human rights. I'm not so much talking about every line and letter per se - though I can't think of any rights in the Act that I object to - as the idea that humans have a certain dignity and a certain set of rights just because they're human. That sort of cultural attitude doesn't just arise naturally, and it isn't just sustained in spite of the media or political climate - and judging by polls and tabloids, it's not especially strong as it is.
Posturing? Our government and our official opposition? Never ...
The HRA's been in the news a fair bit lately - Labour (who as the party who enacted the damn thing might have known better) and the Conservatives have both decided to pick on this piece of legislation as the reason why we allegedly can't protect ourselves from foreign murderers/rapists/terrorists/evildoers [delete as appropriate].
Essentially, they object to the idea of an absolute ban on deporting people to countries where they might be tortured or abused; and especially given the government's attempts to negotiate Memoranda of Understanding with such well-known and trusty, liberal regimes as Algeria, Jordan and Egypt, they feel that we need to be able to evict such individuals regardless. Labour have been talking, albeit vaguely and with no particular timescale, about the possibility of legislating to make judges "balance public safety with individual rights", while the Tories have been talking about reforming or repealing the Human Rights Act outright.
Both of them seem to be ignoring the tiny little detail that, even if we amended the HRA, repealed it or put it under a parliamentary fatwa, we'd still be part of the European Convention on Human Rights. People would still be perfectly within their rights to appeal to the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg (nothing to do with the European Union, incidentally), calling on the Convention in its full form. It would certainly slow down the decision-making process and make it more expensive (one way of spending money saved by cutting legal aid I suppose ...), but it wouldn't affect the basic issue. So are we going to withdraw from the Convention, partially or wholly? We would then have the distinction of being, along with Belarus and Kazakhstan, the only European states banned from the Council of Europe because our human rights record wasn't up to scratch. Which I suppose would arguably make us tough on crime, but I'm not sure how a photo line-up of Blair/Cameron and Lukashenko would look ...
The HRA and appeals to Strasbourg before it have actually done a lot of good in Britain, and it would be nice to hear people talk about that a bit more. Rape victims, severely disabled individuals, same-sex partners and indeed Prince Charles have all been helped by use of the Convention, either in British or European courts. Unsurprisingly, we don't tend to hear as much about them as we do about dangerous criminals allegedly roaming our streets thanks to the Human Rights Act, but these groups do exist. Quite frankly, leaving Prince Charles aside, they're rather larger in number. And in the most famous case in 2004, where the House of Lords ruled that the treatment of 11 foreign nationals - who were detained without trial, without seeing the evidence against them, without even knowing the charges against them and with minimal review of their detention by SIAC, which met in secret when much of the evidence was considered - we had to rely on the Human Rights Act to lay down what a constitutional government's limits were. Judges can't strike down Acts of Parliament - they can only state that they are incompatible with the rights to which Britain is signed up - but personally, I'm rather glad to have an independent watchdog to suggest that, just possibly, if you're going to lock someone up for an indeterminate period of time a reason and a trial should be involved somewhere along the line.
The boring, undramatic response to things like problems with parole violators would be to actually make systems work properly. There's no evidence that the release of Anthony Rice, or of foreign offenders, had anything to do with the Human Rights Act - the problem in both cases was a very simple one of human error, on the part of the parole board and the Home Office respectively. The HRA already provides that rights may often be limited in the interests of public safety. And given that leaving the Council of Europe would probably make EU membership pretty untenable too, the most we could do by repealing the Human Rights Act would be to make individuals appeal to Strasbourg again.
But it's still important for two reasons; first, repealing or weakening the HRA will, to a greater or lesser extent, take an important part of justice - the weighing up of rights in a free society - and contract it out to Strasbourg. One of the key arguments for the HRA in the first place was that it would "bring rights home" and allow British, rather than (mostly) continental, judges to rule on these issues. The second is that it's part of a wider assault on the idea of human rights. These sorts of announcements make the political weather and help to shape attitudes, and we need a culture of commitment to human rights. I'm not so much talking about every line and letter per se - though I can't think of any rights in the Act that I object to - as the idea that humans have a certain dignity and a certain set of rights just because they're human. That sort of cultural attitude doesn't just arise naturally, and it isn't just sustained in spite of the media or political climate - and judging by polls and tabloids, it's not especially strong as it is.
Posturing? Our government and our official opposition? Never ...