Votes for Prisoners
Published as ‘No escaping the fact: voting right overdue’ in The Birmingham Post, October 17, 2005.
Link to story here.
As relevant today as it was 5 years ago.
This is particularly damning...
"This Government’s record on human rights is frankly embarrassing – from violations of the rights of mental patients to the failure to protect children from unlawful corporal punishment in the home – and it has now received over 100 guilty judgements from the ECHR, several of which it has done nothing substantive about after five years or more. So, if there is to be the review that the Post’s report referred to, you certainly shouldn’t hold your breath.
The fact is that, despite having passed a Human Rights Act in 1998 in effect incorporating the rights contained in the European Convention into UK law, ministers are extremely selective about which rights and freedoms they accept.
They opted out of the Convention altogether in order to detain foreign terror suspects indefinitely.
They want to give themselves the right to use evidence acquired through torture carried out by another state, while ending for us the right to trial by jury and, in respect of ID cards, the right to privacy.
In short, their view seems to be that, if a particular right or freedom becomes politically inconvenient, it can be redefined as a privilege".
Er? I wonder what I'm alright Jack Straw has to say?
A mixture of law, politics, autobiography and humour. Once described as "The Devilish Advocate" (Guardian), I do have the ability to provoke a response. Sometimes it comes from someone who uses a thought process, and sometimes from jerks usually associated with the knee.
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