Public Law expert David Radlett says Labour MP Sadiq Khan is wrong to claim that the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) “was drawn up by Tory ministers”.
Commenting on an article published online by The Independent entitled: Labour Party conference: Sadiq Kahn (sic) vows to put human rights at heart of general election campaign, David says: ‘The European Convention on Human Rights was signed on 4th November 1950 and was ratified by the United Kingdom on 8th March 1951 during the lifetime of Clement Attlee’s great Labour government.
‘The Conservatives did not return to office until 25th October 1951. To plead that the Conservative David Maxwell Fyfe, later Viscount Kilmuir, contributed to the drafting of the Convention is to assert no more than a senior lawyer of the day – who also happened to be a Tory – did so. Whilst there was a Conservative government in office when the Convention came into force in 1953 (when the necessary number of other states had joined the UK in ratifying it) there was at that time no reason to think that repudiation was desirable or necessary: it was just not an issue.
‘Hopefully we can keep it that way, but there is a problem which does not lie with the actual words in the ECHR to which the Human Rights Act 1998 is supposed to give further effect – whoever agreed those words in the first place – but rather in the way that they are interpreted and extended by the judges in Strasbourg and, indeed, by our own judges, so as to apply to situations which should remain in the arena for democratic and accountable decision-making. The conclusion that disenfranchising 0.15% of the population (convicted prisoners) renders an election unfree is but one example of dubious extension, and the assertion that a state must throw its mantle of protection around a non-citizen “no matter how dangerous or undesirable they are” is another.
‘The fact that we may applaud either or both of these decisions is not the point: we should remain able to participate in making or changing them through our elected representatives, and not be mere spectators with those representatives whilst unelected, unrepresentative and unaccountable judges impose their views on us all.’
David is a Lecturer in Law at Kent Law School, currently teaching Public Law. Read more about his research and publications on his staff profile.