The Human Rights Act is no friend of freedom
By Luke Gittons, Spiked:
The debate around the European Union has been accompanied by a renewed debate on the Human Rights Act 1998. Depending on who you listen to, Britain’s adherence to European human-rights legislation is either catastrophic or essential. On the one hand, it is argued that human-rights law prevents the government extraditing dangerous criminals, demolishes our national borders and substantially weakens the sovereignty of the UK’s parliament and judiciary. On the other hand, those who support the Human Rights Act tend to present the consequences of abandoning it in apocalyptic terms. According to some, leaving the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) would mean a complete collapse of democratic freedom and an exposure to tyranny.
The Conservative government has spent a long time trying to repeal the Human Rights Act. It formed part of Michael Howard’s election campaign in 2005. In 2006, David Cameron introduced the idea of replacing it with a British Bill of Rights, which then became a pledge in the Conservatives’ 2015 election manifesto. It was thought that a public consultation on the repeal would be published before Christmas last year, but, speaking at the home affairs select committee, the justice secretary, Michael Gove, appeared to put the repeal on hold ‘until 2016’. Last week, the home secretary, Theresa May, raised the debate around human rights in the context of the Brexit campaign, saying that ‘regardless of the EU referendum… if we want to reform human-rights laws in this country, it isn’t the EU we should leave but the ECHR and the jurisdiction of its court’.
The Conservative argument against human rights is fundamentally that it limits the UK’s national sovereignty. When Abu Qatada, the so-called spiritual father of al-Qaeda, spent over a decade in UK custody awaiting extradition, Theresa May blamed the ECHR, which had, she said, ‘moved the goalposts’ by establishing new legal grounds for blocking Qatada’s deportation. Hence it is often suggested that the UK justice system is held in a stranglehold by the European courts.
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