According to the Tory party conference, they are planning to “do something” about the European Court of Human Rights, and to stop the British government being overruled by the ECHR. Most of the time we hear about the work of the ECHR through ridiculous stories but the court deals with tens of thousands of cases a year. So most of the time we do not get to hear about it’s work. After all sensible decisions do not make good news stories.
Let’s look at the rights that the ECHR is there to protect :-
- respecting rights
- life
- torture
- servitude
- liberty and security
- fair trial
- retroactivity
- privacy
- conscience and religion
- expression
- association
- marriage
- effective remedy
- discrimination
- derogations
- aliens
- abuse of rights
- permitted restrictions
Which is a long list, and could do with some additional explanation, which can be found here.
The reason the Tories are giving for abolishing our human rights is that they don’t want interference from the European Union in their actions. Which when you come down to it is kind of worrying – our government finds our human rights and the organisation created after World War II to protect those rights “inconvenient”.
There are those who will ramble on about sovereign rights which are important, but not as important as human rights. People are more important than states.
The more the Tories want to evade the oversight of the ECHR, the more I want the ECHR to be keeping an eye on the behaviour of “our” government. The judges of the ECHR may be unelected but they’re more trustworthy than a bunch of corrupt politicians who find our human rights inconvenient.