The Conservative Party has announced plans to reverse the Human Rights Act, which incorporates the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) into British law, if they win a majority in the next general election.

If Britain cannot veto the ECHR’s laws from applying to Britain, then Britain will remove itself from the convention.

This is absurd.

Fine for the rest of Europe – but not for us



Justice Minister Chris Grayling was on the radio this morning, bleating on about the need to ensure the British parliament had the final say on laws that affected the British population. He said that the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg had overstepped its remit by taking laws beyond their original intention and that the whole thing could be better organized through a British bill of rights.

This is, again, all absurd.

Firstly, it ignores the basic principle enshrined in the title. These are _human_ rights, not national privileges. By their very nature they should be inalienable to individuals regardless of nationality.

They are not predicated on gender, race, or religion, and neither should they be reliant on your present address. The only thing that should matter is that you are, in fact, human.

Grayling also cited the issue of the court reinterpreting the original 60-year-old declaration as a reason why the ECHR is no longer fit for purpose. I agree. The world we live in today is extensively different from that of the 1950s. We have the Internet, for starters. Homosexuality is no longer illegal. Racism is. Texts need to be allowed room to grow; otherwise they wither and die, or their original meaning gets corrupted.

I would rather have a judge, a legal expert, reinterpret a law then leave it to the masses and the media. The right to bear arms enshrined in the U.S. constitution is a prime example of why. Originated in frontier times and clung to by sections of that country like a religion, it is responsible for the failure of multiple presidents to pass stricter gun laws, despite a string of national gun-crime related tragedies.

The final point Grayling made was an attempt to show why the CHR in Strasbourg is a distinctly British problem: why it’s fine for the rest of Europe – but not for us.

The UK doesn’t have a written constitution. We wrote the Magna Carta in 1215 (another document that gets reinterpreted and adapted as time goes by), but after that we base ourselves on common law. Our constitution is the sum of all the laws in the UK.

Grayling argued that this causes the European Court of Human Rights to effectively get a veto on any laws passed in a democratically elected parliament. To which my response is: if your laws are in violation of human rights, maybe they shouldn’t be in the statute book.

Isolationism rather than constructive dialogue



The ECHR has become controversial in the UK in recent years. Large segments of the media and the Conservative Party resent the insistence of the Court that prisoners should be allowed to vote and that foreign nationals cannot automatically be deported if they commit a crime.

But announcing an intention to rip up 60 years worth of human rights progress on the continent and start again is pandering and populism at its most damaging. It reverts back to the quickly becoming de facto UK (here read Conservative Party) position of threats and isolationism rather than constructive dialogue.

So there we have it. If certain parts of the Conservative Party have their way by 2017, the UK could be out of the EU and out of the European Convention on Human Rights. Who is the only other country in the club? Belarus. Hardly the benchmark the UK should be aiming for.