Does it matter if we ignore the ECHR?

Civitas, 8 February 2011

In an emphatic open letter, the Director of the Howard League, Frances Crook, calls on all MPs to stand against Thursday’s motion relating to voting by prisoners. Ms Crook rightly states that the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is “arguably one of the greatest achievements in recent history”. Similarly, it is true that, so far as the decision on Thursday is concerned, “our reputation in the international legal world is on the line”. However, whilst these points are wholly correct, Ms Crook’s conclusion is disappointingly myopic and alarmingly naïve.

Firstly, Ms Crook gravely errs in her assumption that the MPs tabling the debate would respond to the question, “Does it matter if we ignore the ECHR?” with a resolute “no”. There is no attempt to “ignore the ECHR”. Drafted in the wake of the Second World War, the European Convention is a sound abstraction of the need to protect human rights and freedoms. The vote on Thursday is in no way a move by Westminster MPs to bypass these fundamental principles; it is, however, a boldly determined effort to resist the creeping expansionism of the ECHR’s supposed guardian, the European Court of Human Rights.

Reframing Ms Crook’s question, these MPs are indeed acutely sensible to the fact that whether we choose to ignore the European Court’s interpretation of the ECHR is of critical importance. Over 60 years ago our politicians signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights. In so doing, they did not sign away the sovereignty of Parliament. There is a world of difference between compliance with the Convention – which MPs realise does still matter a “great deal” – and submitting to the will of a distant, power-hungry judicial dynamo. It is Ms Crook, not the MPs, who has missed the “fundamental point”.

In a statement that demonstrates the totality with which she fails to grasp the pertinent issue, Ms Crook asks: “On what legal authority could we question our own government when Parliamentary sovereignty fails to prevent our government from banning homosexuals from serving in the armed forces?” If we bend to Strasbourg as Ms Crook invites us to do, it is this very principle of Parliamentary sovereignty that will be so badly diluted as to risk becoming irreparably inert.

Thursday’s motion does not seek to enable MPs to pick and choose those rights they are happy to uphold and those more inconvenient rights they would rather dismiss. The debate is no longer whether or not prisoners should have the right to vote; it is whether or not we want our elected representatives to be able to make this decision on our behalf. There is a crucial distinction between the commitment of the signatories to the Council of Europe to uphold universal rights principles, and the laudable reluctance of the sovereign UK Parliament to cede to the will of the unelected and insatiably expansionist behemoth that the European Court of Human Rights threatens to become.

Much of the “moral authority” that the UK has earned “in international law and diplomacy” stems directly from its unique and longstanding constitutional traditions and Ms Crook is absolutely right when she says that, on Thursday, “the resolve of the UK Parliament will be tested”. We must now hope that our Parliament has sufficient resolve to defend the bedrock of this constitution and realises that compliance with this principle does indeed still matter a great deal.