Britain should be proud of the Human Rights Act – and protect it

Britain should be proud of the Human Rights Act – and protect it

This important legislation embodies British values, not submission to Europe

Geoffrey Bindman
guardian.co.uk, Monday 29 August 2011 18.59 BST

Nick Clegg has at last delivered an effective rebuttal of a series of intemperate attacks on the Human Rights Act made by the prime minister (Do not trash the rights act, 26 August). Too often they have been the product of simple factual errors and misunderstandings.

As you reported, in his speech this month David Cameron said that he wanted "a fightback against the wrongheaded ideas, bureaucratic nonsense, and destructive culture" that led to the riots, including "twisting and misrepresenting of human rights in a way that has undermined personal responsibility" (UK riots: Cameron and Miliband go head to head in riot aftermath, 15 August). Unfortunately the misrepresentation has often been his.

He has twice wrongly blamed the act for judicial decisions of which he disapproved. In both cases deportation of criminally convicted foreign nationals was refused by the court. Aso Mohammed Ibrahim was allowed to remain in the UK with his English wife and children because the Home Office had waited six years after his sentence before seeking to deport him. The other case was that of Learco Chindamo, the notorious killer of the headmaster Philip Lawrence. Many would have welcomed his deportation but, as the judge made clear, it was an EU directive that prevented it, not the Human Rights Act.

Those who brief Cameron are far too ready to take their cue from tabloid newspapers. The Daily Mirror headed its comment on Chindamo "Human rights are all wrong". Ludicrous fictions have been peddled by other papers. Clegg mentions the Sun's claim that police were forced by the act to offer Kentucky Fried Chicken to a burglar on a roof. More seriously it was falsely claimed that the act prohibits the police from displaying "wanted" posters for dangerous criminals, and that it required the premature release of a violent rapist.

What underlies the tabloid hostility is the perception that the Human Rights Act is a symbol of European domination, because it infiltrates the European human rights convention into our domestic law. This ignores – as Clegg points out – the British origin of the convention. It was a Tory lord chancellor, Maxwell Fyfe, who played the key role in drafting it. Winston Churchill was its strong supporter. He knew it embodied traditional British values. It is therefore puzzling that the act does not appeal to progressive Conservatives like Cameron. Human rights are no more than the minimum safeguards of personal freedom and dignity. They have been our gift to Europe and not the other way round.

Of course the act could be improved and, as Clegg suggests, could be added to by protecting other rights such as jury trial. The commission Cameron set up to examine the creation of a British bill of rights could do useful work in promoting public appreciation of its values and, to use his words, "get a grip on the misrepresentation of human rights". But the act must stay. It protects the weak and the vulnerable, and, as Clegg says, it sends a powerful message to the rest of the world about what we stand for. We have a proud record.