Judge insists UK courts no longer automatically defer to ECHR’s rulings, while lawyers rail against Britain’s potential repeal of the Human Rights Act

Sir Brian Leveson, the judge most famous for his report into press ethics, has said he does not consider himself “crushed by the European jackboot” when it comes to applying the European convention of human rights in British courts.

Leveson told an audience at the Hay festival that UK judges were not bound by the decisions of the European court of human rights (ECHR), and instead were only obliged to take the Strasbourg court’s rulings “into consideration”.

Leveson said the convention was “devised in large part by British lawyers, reflecting British values, to ensure that the activities that we’d all heard about during the second world war never repeated themselves”.



Though cautious not to expressly pass judgment on any future or current lawmaking around the subject, the president of the Queen’s bench division intimated that ECHR rulings were less binding than is widely perceived.

“When the convention became a part of UK law it allowed our citizens to cite the convention directly. That doesn’t mean we are bound [by its decisions] ... the legislation only requires us to take them into account,” he said.

“So if it looks like a [British] statute could have one of two meanings, and one complies with the convention and one doesn’t, we are required by statute to follow the one that complies with our convention responsibilities.”

Leveson said that a British judge would never automatically defer to Strasbourg and that UK courts had “matured” in recent years in their consideration of ECHR decisions.

“The oath that every British judge takes is to try every case according to the laws and usage of the realm, which means we have to comply with the law as set out by parliament and higher courts. Parliament has required us to take account of European decisions.”

“I do not consider myself ‘crushed by the European jackboot’,” he said, repeating the phrase used by the panel’s chair, Prof Philippe Sands. “I believe that we as British judges are doing no more than parliament requires of us [in applying the convention in Britain], I have no doubt about that at all.

He added: “Some early decisions by the then House of Lords did veer to the view that ‘Strasbourg has spoken, that’s the end of it’, but we’ve matured in our approach to the European court, and that court has learnt from us as well.”

Other members of the panel, all human rights lawyers, were far more outspoken in their criticism of a potential UK withdrawal from the European convention and the possible repeal of the Human Rights Act.

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Thomas Buergenthal, a former judge at the international criminal court in the Hague, said he reacted with “sadness and surprise” to those arguing that Britain should leave and said the UK’s absence would be to the detriment of European citizens, particularly those with less scrupulous governments.

“I think the UK doesn’t have to be in the convention because the legal system in Britain is bad,” Buergenthal said. “The presence is so important because Britain influences other judges from other countries and how the law operates.”

Richard Goldstone, the South African judge who was a United Nations prosecutor at the international criminal tribunal, said it would be a “great pity for the United Kingdom to set this precedent”.

“It would enable some autocratic set of leaders around the world to say, ‘why should we be bound by international law if this great font of democracy, the United Kingdom, is pulling out?’”