Bad start for bill of rights

Bad start for bill of rights

If the Tories really want public engagement in the new review, why did they bury the last one?

By Afua Hirsch, Guardian, 11 March 2011



It's official – politicians cannot be straight with the public on human rights. Take the latest announcement – apparently leaked by government sources – about a commission of inquiry into a bill of rights. The measure has long been promised by the Conservatives in line with their official dislike of the Human Rights Act – which they have branded a project of the left that gave "European judges" too much power.

The seven supposed members of this new commission, including Lib Dem peer Lord Anthony Lester, deny any knowledge of their appointment. But more interesting is the remarkable sense of deja-vu over the Tories' setting up a commission. Because they did exactly the same thing in March 2007, creating a seven-member panel whose mandate was "to develop the project for a home-grown bill of rights".

This commission worked for at least two years on the project, and Conservatives say it concluded its work and produced a report. Yet this alleged report is nowhere to be seen. Sources speak of it having been "buried".

The only documents published during its time reveal a spectrum of opinion over the Human Rights Act: support for the current act at one end, and hostility to the entire Europe-wide human rights infrastructure at the other.

Jonathan Fisher QC, a member of the 2007 commission, made his position clear in a document published at the time by the Society of Conservative Lawyers: "The European convention on human rights is a fundamentally flawed and lopsided document, responding to the horrors of Nazi Germany, with an entrenched bias in favour of individual rights," he wrote.

Aside from the obvious question of how anyone can turn a safeguard against repeating the horrors of Nazi Germany into a bad thing, this and other statements by members of the original Conservative commission demonstrate clearly where the party has positioned itself.

It has been established Conservative policy for several years now to "replace the Human Rights Act, which has undermined the government's ability to deal with crime and terrorism, with a British bill of rights".

Dissent from this view within the party is also clear. The lord chancellor, Kenneth Clarke, famously said the idea of a policy replacing the human rights act with a bill of rights was "xenophobic and legal nonsense".

It was the Conservative Winston Churchill who promoted the European convention of human rights in the first place, and successive Conservatives in the 70s and 80s who backed its incorporation into UK law.

Conservative support for the Human Rights Act, however, pales compared with that of the Liberal Democrats – the only party to staunchly stick by the law throughout both Labour's flagrant abuse of it post-9/11, and the Tories' current denunciation of its ideals.

Which is why, perhaps, the Conservative commission died a silent and invisible death. It's hard to see how the coalition agreement, with its promise to "incorporate and build on all our obligations under the European convention on human rights" would have been compatible with the likely outcome of Fisher's report.

The one thing all parties do agree on is that the Human Rights Act, for various reasons, has failed to attract public backing. One goal of the forthcoming commission will, apparently, be to give the public a sense of ownership over whatever human rights law emerges from the process.

But if, after all the attempts to stoke public bloodlust for the burning of human rights altogether, a rebranding exercise is all the new commission will be, then the new age of transparency and public involvement in human rights has not got off to a good start.