You’ll regret not having a Human Rights Act when Labour get back in

I’ve been thinking about the Conservative party’s proposal for a Bill of Rights and am finding it difficult to make up my mind. On the one hand, I like the idea of making the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom the ultimate guarantor of our human rights rather than the European Court. British judges are surely more reliable guardians of liberty than the jurists in Strasbourg. But on the other, I’m nervous about the rights enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights becoming less sacrosanct, particularly Article 10, which deals with freedom of expression. I’ll explain what I mean by that a little bit further down.

Let’s start with a straw man. The fact that David Cameron has said he would like to repeal Labour’s Human Rights Act doesn’t mean he’s seeking to disapply the European convention. On the contrary, his proposal is to embody the convention in a British bill of rights. Nor is he arguing that the European Court should be completely disregarded. Rather, if the judges in Strasbourg rule that a particular British law is incompatible with the convention, that would be treated as advisory rather than binding under the new proposal. Whether to amend or repeal the law in question would be a matter for Parliament.

So far, so good. But if the convention will still apply, what guarantee is there that the British Supreme Court, whose judgements would be binding, will interpret it any differently to the European Court? Like many conservatives, I think it’s absurd when a foreign convicted murderer, on his release from prison, cannot be deported by the Home Office because Strasbourg has ruled that sending him back to his country of origin would violate his right to a family life.