The European court of human rights is not all David Cameron has his sights on
Tory backbenchers hoping for sabre-rattling by David Cameron at Strasbourg on Wednesday, when he delivered his speech on reform of the European court of human rights, will have been disappointed. He was lavish in his praise for the successes of the 60-year-old European convention on human rights (ECHR) and gentle in his admonishments. The "physically ill" feeling that apparently afflicted him when contemplating the court's ruling against the UK's blanket ban on prisoners' voting seemed to have abated.
Who can disagree with the prime minister's view that the 50,000-plus backlog of pending cases is unsustainable? Certainly not the European court itself. A new regime was introduced only in June 2010 and there are signs that it is bearing fruit. The cause of the backlog was the enlargement of the council to 47 states following the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Six countries, including Poland, Romania, Russia and Ukraine, account for two-thirds of all applications, and about 60% are "repetitive cases" where past violations have not been rectified.
But oiling the wheels of the court so that it can more swiftly hear the cases of UK applicants is hardly what has been exercising Eurosceptic politicians calling for the UK to withdraw from the ECHR every day for the last 18 months. The "lively debate" about human rights in the UK that Cameron euphemistically referred to in his speech is in reality a toxic screaming match about the legitimacy of foreign judges – and often any judges – holding elected MPs and the government to account.
Cameron's offer to the court's critics is that "the national decision should hold" where an issue "has been subjected to proper, reasoned democratic debate", and scrutinised by national courts. What? Isn't that diplomatic language for keep your tanks off our lawn? Does that not nullify Winston Churchill's basic vision for the court, to hold states to account by a higher judicial authority upholding a European-wide set of values, inspired by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Cameron's reply is that countries that commit "the most serious violations of human rights" should still be dealt with by the Strasbourg court. But "in Britain we have gone through all reasonable national processes". Belief in human rights has "animated the British people for centuries". Do not these foreign judges realise that the European convention was for them, not us, he seemed to be straining to say.
So which of these UK cases validates the prime minister's claim that Strasbourg has been acting like a "small claims court"? When journalists were forced to reveal sources; when police could stop and search any of us without suspicion in a designated area; when innocent people's DNA was retained indefinitely; when a 15-year-old boy was flogged by police as corporal punishment; when social services failed to act on complaints of child abuse; when foreign terror suspects were detained indefinitely without charge or trial?
Cameron rightly emphasises that human rights begins at home. This principle is written into the very first article of the ECHR, which requires each state to secure the rights in the convention to "everyone in their jurisdiction". This is what the 1998 Human Rights Act was designed to do, bringing the UK in line with every other state in the Council of Europe. But Cameron claims in his speech that he is "investigating the case for a UK bill of rights", which would overturn the Human Rights Act, to "get better at implementing the convention at national level". Yet the reason he gave when announcing this policy last year was that decisions should be "made in this parliament rather than in the courts". It is not just the Strasbourg court that he has in his sights.
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