Now that I've covered issues relating to university life and my course, I'd like to write more about current issues within the British and European legal system.
I'm sure many of you will be aware of the fact that some minister's are currently trying to suggest that the European Court of Human Rights should merely focus on "major issues of principle". Clarke believes that the ECtHR should focus on what the Daily Telegraph refers to as "major issues such as freedom and torture and not minor compensation claims".
Words cannot express my anger at this suggestion from Britain and Switzerland. I was angry enough, when the Conservatives said that they had plans to repeal the Human Rights Act 1998 because this appeared to be a way to win votes from those, who have been convinced by rubbish written by newspapers such as the Daily Mail that rapists have been allowed to leave jail early because of this act.
The main point of the Human Rights Act is that public authorities have to behave to act in a way that is compatible with this act. Nevertheless, it only affects judges' judgements in the sense that they have to interpret the laws so that they are in line with this act. As can be seen in the case of Ghaidan v Mendoza, this power that section 3 of the act gives judges allows judges to modify the meaning of legislation that affects their judgement, so long as it does not conflict with the purpose of legislation. Section 4 of the act makes it quite clear that judges can only declare legislation as incompatible with this act, if they cannot find a way to interpret legislation in such a way that it is in line with the act whilst simultaneously fulfilling the purpose of the incompatible act. So the Human Rights Act is clearly not the reason for scenarios such as rapists getting out of jail early, etc.
Furthermore, as Tom Bingham said in his article about this act (which was published shortly before his death in 2010), it would take us back to a time, where individuals had to pay £30,000 (this pre HRA 1998 figure could very well have increased with inflation) in order to make sure that the outcome of their case was the result of judgement that was in line with the European Convention on Human Rights. So repealing the Human Rights Act 1998 would mean that the poorest people in our society would be less likely to be able to ensure that the judgements of their cases were in line with the convention.
As you can imagine, I was relieved when the coalition with the Liberal Democrats stopped the Conservatives from repealing the act. But it seems that the grounds for my relief had weak foundations because limiting the power of the ECtHR is inherently worse.
The whole reason why the convention was drawn up was to limit the likelihood of dictators like Hitler from being able to being able to have such power in the future. So naturally the ECtHR was set up to make sure that countries, who signed the convention, adhered to the rights enshrined in the convention.
Kenneth Clarke might claim that this has led to a culture of people claiming compensation on the grounds that "something has been done to your dog" but I'd love to know which case he's referring to when he says this, because it sounds an awful lot like the rumour started by Theresa May that an illegal immigrant couldn't be deported because he had a pet cat in the UK. I find it hard to believe that someone would spend so much money on taking a case to the ECtHR because something had been done to their dog.
Moreover amongst issues that he defines as "minor compensation claims", he includes the issue of people challenging the blanket ban on full time prisoners being able to vote. The notion of this issue not being worthy of scrutiny from the ECtHR disgusts me. The right to fair representation is something that many people such as Emeline Pankhurst have suffered for. What's more, many people such as those currently holding protests in Russia are an example of how many people still suffer for the right to fair representation. Indeed countries of the European Union criticise countries like Russia for not holding fair elections, so how can Clarke then describe the right to representation as a right which is merely used to claim compensation? In general, if we start saying that it's more important for the ECtHR to uphold some rights in comparison to others, then that is to say that some of the suffering, which people endured under the Nazis, other dictatorships, and so on, is less meaningful.
Furthermore, what one might define as a "major issue" is subjective to the person. For example, (I don't want to focus too much on the right to fair representation) nowadays the good majority of us would think it cruel to deny women the right to vote but I'm sure that at the time of the protests by suffragettes many people thought that the suffragettes were just campaigning about the "minor" issue of women not being able to vote, so I think we can conclude that there are a lot of serious issues regarding human rights, which could potentially be defined as "minor". We could therefore destroy the efficiency of the convention, if we categorised some alleged breaches of the convention as "minor compensation claims".
It naturally suits a country's government to say that ECtHR to focus on what they deem to be "major issues" because it means that they don't have to pay so much in compensation to victims of human rights abuse and it gives them a better image because there'll be less cases in the newspaper of the ECtHR saying that a right enshrined in the convention was breached. But if we change the role of the ECtHR so that a country's laws/legal system are less open to foreign scrutiny then we would be destroying the purpose of the establishment of the court, which was to make sure that the courts and laws did comply with the convention.
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