Musicman
Suspended / Banned
- Messages
- 9,866
- Name
- Rob Telford
- Edit My Images
- No
If that is your response, then it is plain that you don't understand what the HRA 1998 does.
So, to clear things up, a little history...
The UK was instrumental in drafting the European Convention On Human Rights in 1949-50, which is an international treaty. The treaty was signed by the UK in November 1950 and ratified by Parliament in 1953.
In 1959, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg was established under Article 19 of the 1950 Convention. In 1966, the UK accepted the right of individual British citizens to petition the Court for judgement on whether their rights under the Convention had been breached.
The problem with this setup was that going to Strasbourg is an expensive and lengthy business for both appellants and defendants (i.e. the UK government).
Moreover, Strasbourg was the only place qualified to rule upon adherence to the Convention. UK courts could only make their rulings in the context of British common law and statute, and find that they were later overturned by Strasbourg on appeal. It was only if and when Parliament subsequently amended statute law that they could acknowledge the existence of the Convention.
The Human Rights Act 1998 was designed to solve this problem. The heart of the Act is Section 2, which states
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/42/section/2
The Human Rights Act 1998 does nothing to extend rights already available to British citizens under the Convention. All the HRA does is to allow UK courts to take account of those and save both you and Theresa May the trouble and expense of going to Strasbourg to discover whether your rights have been breached or not; the ruling to be made by British judges familiar with British law and culture.
Even then (in common with the Strasbourg court) UK judges can only declare that a particular course of action or law is incompatible with the Convention [s4 of the Act]. They have no right to overturn it and it is up to the government to decide what to do about it.
If you have arguments with those rights, then your ire with the HRA is misdirected, you should take issue with a treaty that the UK signed in 1950. If you think those rights are excessive, then repealing the Human Rights Act will make no difference, since UK citizens retained the right to further appeal to Strasbourg after the HRA was passed. The only remedy would be for the UK to withdraw entirely from the international treaty which it drafted and signed in 1950.
Oh, and on the point of life sentences...
Presumably you're referring to the case of Vintner & Others vs the United Kingdom, which was ruled upon by the ECHR in July 2013 and was referred to as part of the 'case for change' by The Conservative Party in their proposals document for changing Britain's human rights laws published after David Cameron's speech at their party conference last week, and probably forms the basis of some press report you may have read about the Human Rights Act.
http://www.conservatives.com/~/media/Files/Downloadable Files/HUMAN_RIGHTS.pdf
The Conservative Party said:
This is, quite simply, wrong.
s106 of the judgment in this case reads as follows [emphasis added]
http://hudoc.echr.coe.int/sites/fra/pages/search.aspx?i=001-122664#{"itemid":["001-122664"]}
European Court of Human Rights said:
There was no violation of Article 3 of the Convention and the appeal was dismissed on a majority of 4-3.
This, of course, was the Strasbourg court's ruling, and in which the HRA 1998 played no part.
Last edited:
