So the Conservative party is planning to review, amend or repeal the Human Rights Act 1998 if they get elected.
This pre-election policy spin was hinted at by their leader Michael Howard and more recently by the otherwise sensible sounding David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary his article published in the peculiar low circulation (around 60,000) right wing magazine The Spectator (this reprint of the article is available on the Tory party website)
The Spectator is a peculiar right wing magazine, with a readership of only about 60,000, which, under its editor Boris Johnson Tory MP for Henley (infamous for his buffoonery on TV programmes such as "Have I Got News For You"), and whose publisher is alleged to be literally in bed with the Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett, seems to have forgotten the journalistic standards it used to have in its long historical past, and now seems content to publish stuff full of annoying and intellectually offensive inaccuracies e.g. the recent article "Its time to move on - Britain has no reason to apologise to Poland" by Simon Heffer (who also writes for the Daily Mail) which claimed that the British government could not possibly have sent any aid to the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 because it was too far away, when in fact there were (too few) airdrops from Italy by the RAF and the US airforces.
The David Davis article is also full of such half truths and political spin.
How does the amount of compensation paid by local councils for injuries caused by broken pavements, which they have a statutory duty to maintain, have anything at all to do with the Human Rights Act ?
The "compensation litigation culture" which David Davis is complaining about is a direct result of the "no win, no fee" change to the legal aid rules and previous Tory government's botched privatisations, and the current Labour government's bloated bureaucracies, quangos, non-departmental agencies etc., which are happy to settle financial claims in the public sector with taxpayer's money, whilst denying any personal, corporate, organisational or political responsibility.
Even so, the amount of litigation is still nowhere near the level of the "ambulance chasing" sue and counter sue culture in the USA.
If the Tories are planning to reduce financial compensation claims as a result of Health and Safety violations and negligence, will they actually put the directors of companies or the civil servants responsible for the lax implementation of health, safety or security policies on trial for criminal negligence or corporate manslaughter etc ? Will they actually jail a few "pour encourager les autres" ?
It is completely unacceptable that there should be higher standards of health and safety in other countries than in the United Kingdom, so blaming EU red tape from Brussels etc. is also wrong.
One almost might suspect that this policy is the result of lobbying by people who have a direct financial interest in not paying out compensation or insurance claims - surely there are none of these amongst the Tory party supporters ?
"Overall, we need to nurture a culture of responsibility and common sense. To my mind the worst emanation "cause and effect" of the compensation culture is the Human Rights Act, which incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law. Once, we had inherited English liberties; now, we have incorporated European rights. The English idea "evolved through Magna Carta (1215), the Petition of Right (1628) and the Bill of Rights (1689) " was of freedoms held back from the state. The new idea "invented with the Code Napoleon" is of bounties handed out by the state. Once, the law limited the state and enlarged the sphere in which the citizen could be free; now, it imposes obligations on the state and limits the freedom of the citizen. British judges once "discovered" the law with reference to statute and precedent; now they must "divine" the law by appeal to the declarations of politicians."
When did we suddenly get too many Human Rights ? Who believes that they should meekly accept the granting or denial of rights merely because of any politician's manifesto or arbitrary legal declaration ? Surely an individual has these fundamental human rights, no matter whether the Government chooses to honour them or not ?
What does the alleged and heavily disputed assertion that we live in a "compensation culture" have anything to do with the Human Rights Act ?
All that the Human Rights Act did was to make the final appeals process slightly easier (but no less expensive) by allowing a case to be heard in UK courts, without having to go through UK courts and then also finally to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg (one could never apply directly to this court in the first instance).
The United Kingdom was not only a signatory of the European Convention on Human Rights , and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, but it was British lawyers who essentially draughted both of these just after Worlds War 2.
This is not Code Napoleon legal tradition enforced by Europe on Britain, it is in fact, vice versa.
It is simply not true to claim that Britain has "a long history of civil rights", from the Magna Carta etc. onwards.
It would be truer to say that Britain has a long history of tampering with and revoking Human Rights legislation to suit the powerful.
The Magna Carta, sealed by King John at Runnymede on the 15th of June 1215 AD had nothing to do with any rights or privileges for ordinary people, but only for some of the rebel barons and nobility. Within two months, i.e. as fast as it was possible to make a return journey from London to Rome at that time, by August 1215, the Magna Carta had been reneged on and repealed and those who had signed it as beneficiaries were excommunicated by Pope Innocent III.
Yes the Human Rights Act should be reviewed, not to weaken it further like the Conservative and Labour parties seem to want to do, but to strengthen it and modernise it for the 21st century.
As it is based on the European Declaration of Human Rights, it does not explicitly cover the fundamental rights which we all should have with respect to the hugely important scientific and technology advances in genetic engineering and information technology.
It is inconceivable that if the the ECHR were being written today, that it could ignore these powerful technologies, which have such a potential for good, but which also have a massive potential for evil, against which Human Rights legislation should protect individuals, families and ethnic groups from abuse by government and corporate interests.
I suspect David Davies has got into a hopeless muddle here because the Tory Party is now trying to face both ways on law and order. While they have realised there are threats to individual liberty to which they ought (as a party of a traditional British way of life, if for no other reason) to be opposed, they are fringhtened of seeming not to be "tough" on crime and criminals.
He's essentially right when he points out that the Human Rights Act creates positive rights against persons but leaves our liberties against the power of the state if anything weakened. He's also right to suggest that it marks a change in the nature of our legal system for the worse. (The Convention may have been drafted largely by British lawyers, but it was so drafted with Civil Law constitutions in mind.)
Why it has backfired for Davies, and why he derserves it to backfire in my opinion, is that this important argument is cloaked in the populist cause of _denying_ rights to unpopular groups, such as prisoners, and conflated with the issue of "compensation culture", which is an almost entirely unrelated phenomenon.
I've always supported the ECHR as it's the nearest thing we have to a constitution, with constitutional protected rights enjoyed in the US that we can only look at with envy.
Davis' babble about existing rights in English law are laughable. All you need to do is take the single document that is the HRA and ask him to point out the same rights in existing statute. Where it even exists, it would come to God-knows how many documents written in abstruse language - all hard to come by, as the HMSO online only has acts going back to 1996. Not exactly easy for the ordinary citizen to point to and be proud of. Maybe this is a typically British approach of 'hoping' that those who rule over us will automatically look after our rights, so we shouldn't ever need to question it.
He also doesn't realise that signatory countries to the ECHR must 'take account' of Strasbourg case-law in their own judicary. So the effect is much the same.
One correction: signing up to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights doesn't really count for much (in the same way member state Governments 'solemnly proclaimed' the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights - which means stuff all). However, we did sign the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights but never signed the 1976 Optional Protocol which would allow citizens to take a case of breach of those rights to a committee of the office of the UNHCHR. Another example of Governments telling the people "you can have these rights so long as you don't actually try to enforce them'. I believe the Tories have been talking about derogating from a significant number of articles in the ECHR if they came to power.
For those interested in the UK involvement in drafting the ECHR, have a look at an excellent book 'Human Rights and the End of Empire - Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention' from OUP (http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-926789-8).
The link to the article you have cited on the conservative web site seems to be broken. Thanks for pointing all this stuff out - I thought it had skimmed over everyone's head in the upcoming tory leadership elections - it would seem to me that anyone promising to tamper with the EUHR if they were elected should sound alarm bells for all involved - obviously human rights are not that important to most.