That's an interesting assertion. On what do you base that conclusion? Please don't tell me that it's based upon track record and experience, because ... well ... LOL.
As I already mentioned, all the Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Faeroes) are members of the Council of Europe, subscribe to the ECHR, uphold human rights, and abide by judgments of the ECtHR. This is much the same as the UK, except that in one or two recent cases the UK government has embarrassingly failed to abide by judgments of the ECtHR. No, Europe does not have a monopoly on human rights, and many countries in other parts of the world have various systems, individually or collectively, for trying to promote and secure human rights. Worldwide standards have risen a great deal on average, but there are still many glaring exceptions. Most countries have a written constitution which guarantees various rights, along with a Supreme Court with power to evaluate whether legislative acts violate constitutional rights, and if necessary strike down legislation. The UK does not have and has never had a Supreme Court with such powers, nor such a constitution. The current UK Supreme Court (and its predecessor, the House of Lords judicial committee) can never strike down legislation, and can never reach a judgment in a case which contradicts legislation. The traditional rights embodied in the English Common Law can always be overridden by new Acts, no matter how repugnant, and we have no recourse against this. Except for the ECtHR. It is true that in a philosophical sense human rights are something which everyone possesses and which can never be taken away. They can however be violated. Thus the matter under discussion is the practical mechanisms for legal redress after such violations have occurred, and the proposed abolition of such a mechanism.
The ECHR was pretty much designed and set up by the British after the second world war based very much on British law(maybe English not Scottish, I'd call on Pete1950 to clarify that one) There's an excellent article in the Guardian on this subject that exposes the fallacies behind the thinking. How on earth will withdrawing from a Human Rights system ensure our rights are better protected? It is no more than another Cameron knee jerk reaction to more dribbling lunacy from Farage and his coterie of idiots.
Ive always felt that human rights go without saying. We all intrinsically feel and know what they are as humans. Well some of us, most of us. When you define our rights in text there are dangers. There is always a clever lawyer ready to exploit a misplaced comma or interpretation. This is the problem with any written constitution. Lawyers. However lawyers are also responsible for finding the weakness's for us to plug them. They're like the hackers of the legal world. Some good, some bad. I live in an idealist notion of human rights whereby these rights are automatically yours without consideration of them. But we are not in that world. We are in one whereby we have a written set of rights. The problem is not with the list of our rights, but with certain fastidious adherence to procedure. Sometimes it would be refreshing for a legislator to just rule with a shrug of common sense and tell the person trying to twist the ECHR to piss off and stop being a dickhead. When they apply the ECHR they forget to apply the humanity to it at times and it becomes a rote of absolutes. I understand this issue. But the conservatives threat to pull away from it completely worries me. Ive seen my fair share of demos. The Criminal Justice Bill, the Poll Tax etc. When you witness 3 police officers with shields pin 2 young girls up against the railings at Hyde Park Corner and proceed to batter them with batons, your view of your own place in this society changes fundamentally. Who do you call when the police are out of order? All peoples need protection from their own government and its functionaries. This is what the ECHR are for. You don't throw the baby out with the dishwater.
As the article points out it has more to do with politics than law. A point I have made previously. The article also asserts that parliament can opt out of the ECHR and therefore has ultimate authority but I have already read elsewhere that it can't. Which is right ?
Yes, parliament has ultimate and unlimited authority. Speaking hypothetically, parliament could depose the Queen, abolish habeas corpus, abolish the courts, introduce imprisonment without trial, legalise torture, extend its own life ... Just because parliament has power to doesn't mean it should do any of these things. Or that it could do without leading to chaos and catastrophe. In the same way, hypothetically parliament could withdraw from the EU, the Council of Europe, NATO, the UN, the World Trade Organisation, the Commonwealth ... In the same way, just because parliament has undoubted power to turn the UK into North Korea doesn't mean it should. Nor that anybody should vote for a party that admits it plans to do anything like this.
And they would surely struggle to do that as the armed forces and the police serve the crown not the govt of the day.
The principles were based largely on English Common Law principles, but the structures were more on the American model. Sir David Maxwell Fyfe (later Lord Kilmuir) had a major input into the ECHR on behalf of the UK, backed up by Attlee and Churchill. In those days the aim was to invent a way of extending freedom into former Nazi territory, and then Fascist and Communist countries in the future - and it has been reasonably successful in that aim over the past 60 years. Although Kilmuir did a lot to advance human rights for millions of people, concepts have moved on. For example, Kilmuir fought strongly against (sic) gay rights, which at that time were not thought of as human rights at all.
"The Crown" means the government of the day. It doesn't mean HM The Queen personally. Not for a few centuries, anyway.
7. Respect for your private and family life, home and correspondence. If for nothing else, this is big enough reason to stay in the ECHR. Our Government has been trying to make inroads into all of our private lives for years now (with the help of the Yanks). Usually under the guise of protecting us all from Pedo's and other criminals. They already have more than enough powers to investigate these scum under current laws. If we get to a position where government snooping becomes completely invasive, where would we as individuals go to redress those actions if we were not signed up to the ECHR ?
Allegiance is sworn to the queen or whomever is the reining monarch by the police and armed forces ( I used the phrase crown and was wrong to do so). They do not swear any allegiance to a political party or government. This is to ensure that a govt cannot use them for their own means.
Brilliant in a nutshell you have summed up everything that is wrong with todays society Every body expects this that and the other is their right And everybody expects somebody else to take responsibility for when it goes wrong
Surprisingly nobody has mentioned the elephant in the room yet - prisoners' votes. This topic has caused more confusion, misunderstandings, and misrepresentations than any other human rights issue in decades. The background is that convicted criminals can be sentenced by a court to various lawful punishments, such as fines, confiscation of assets, forced unpaid work, imprisonment, and disqualification from various things like driving, holding public office, being a company director, or voting. All these things are punishments imposed judicially by a court and subject to appeal. It would be a violation of the ECHR Article 6 for any of these punishments to be imposed administratively by an automatic, non-judicial process. Unfortunately disqualification from voting here has been imposed on prisoners not as a sentence of a court, but as an extra punishment imposed administratively. Following repeated appeals, the ECtHR has made it very clear that this is a violation. Either disqualification from voting must be imposed by a court as part of a sentence; or prisoners must be allowed to vote; or at the very least, there must be some structured arrangement linking loss of voting rights to the seriousness of the offence. A blanket administrative ban is an obvious and blatant violation, whether in the UK or any other country. The British government (or rather successive governments) have failed to deal with this, and have taken no action to resolve the problem. Given clear rulings from both the ECtHR and the UK Supreme Court, prisoners or ex-prisoners who have actually been treated wrongly are lodging claims in droves for restoration of their votes and for compensation. Given the government's persistent refusal to deal with this properly, all those prisoners' claims are good and valid claims - they cannot be dismissed or struck out. Of all the cases from the UK which people try to take to the ECtHR, 98.8% are struck out or dismissed rapidly, leaving only a handful requiring hearings - until now. As a result of the government's grotesque incompetence on this issue, 2,000 UK prison vote cases have been lodged with the ECtHR recently, and they cannot be struck out because they are good cases. As matters stand, the UK government is bound to lose every one of them, which would be truly gigantic egg-on-face for the Home Secretary and Justice Secretary. And that, I suspect, is why the government has now come up with its frantic, crazy, half-baked scheme for dealing with a problem not by solving it but by creating a very much larger one.
If you choose not to read the papers, watch / listen to the news (via any medium) it's amazing how nice your day to day world seems. The problem is that a very large portion of the media is controlled by a tiny and select group. Therefore the great unwashed out there tend to get a carefully distorted view of the world. Bad news sells....we are attracted to horror stories. I try not to get too stressed by the things I cannot influence. I do vote, but not once has my choice been reflected by the majority, therefore I didn't get the politicians I wanted. Bahhh Bahhh.....now where is that other sheep going....I think I'll follow.
Oh and I agree 100% with Peter1940 as I don't want him to wear out his fingers on that typewriter to computer interface he must be using.
Interesting and informative. Apathy? We all suffer from it at some stage in our lives, myself included, but not when this man rears his head. I would rather jump into a pit of vipers than bed with this Judas! BBC News - Lib Dem conference: Nick Clegg launches attack on Conservatives
