UK challenges human rights court

By Patrick Hennessy, Political Editor

 

The Prime Minister will travel to Strasbourg, home of the court, amid anger at senior levels in the Government over its ruling last week that Abu Qatada, the radical preacher, cannot be deported from Britain.

 

The judges declared that Qatada, who is wanted in Jordan on suspicion of conspiracy to carry out bombings, might not get a fair trial if sent there by the British government. Qatada, who has been described in the past as Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man in Europe and called “truly dangerous” by an English court, has been in jail since 2005, fighting deportation.

 

In his speech Mr Cameron will set out plans for reform of the institution, at which Britain loses three out of every four cases it fights.

 

Britain currently holds the rolling six-monthly chairmanship of the Council of Europe, which oversees the European Court of Human Rights [ECHR].

 

The Prime Minister will call for a “filtering system” that would stop the ECHR dealing with cases that have already been resolved “properly” by national courts, in an attempt to save time and money. Germany is among nations backing calls for reform.

  

Britain is also pushing for changes to the way the court’s judges are appointed. It currently has 47 judges, representing every member state of the Council of Europe including Liechtenstein, Monaco and Andorra.

 

The overall aim is to reform the international court so that it deals only with significant breaches of human rights.

 

The reform process is expected to be a long one, with changes, if approved unanimously by members of the Council of Europe, likely to take two or three years.

 

If they are not brought in, the “nuclear option” of pulling Britain out of the court — possibly on a temporary basis — is winning increasing support among senior Conservative ministers, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt.

 

“We cannot have another Abu Qatada,” a senior government source said. “You have to look at every option down the line, including some sort of temporary withdrawal from the court.

 

“There is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for reform and we currently have it. We cannot have the current system of this panel of European judges being the final court of appeal on issues directly affecting our national security.”

 

Any move by Conservative ministers to pull Britain out of the ECHR would spark an international crisis and has the potential to deal a fatal blow to the Coalition — the Liberal Democrats have a “line in the sand” over human rights.

 

Any threat by the Conservatives to withdraw would, therefore, be unlikely to be made for two or three years. It could, according to senior sources, be enshrined in the party’s manifesto for the next election, in 2015.

 

Yet, withdrawing from the ECHR, while enraging the Lib Dems, would be backed by a large number of Tory MPs and some Cabinet ministers, who have complained that the human rights convention and the Human Rights Act, the British law which gives it force in this country, make it impossible to do their jobs.

 

Theresa May, the Home Secretary, told The Sunday Telegraph last year that she would like to see the Human Rights Act scrapped because it was hampering the Home Office’s struggle to deport dangerous foreign criminals and terrorist suspects.

 

Withdrawal would also be seen as a message to the British judiciary that its interpretation of the Act has frequently been in favour of criminals and illegal immigrants rather than the wider public.

 

Britain’s decision to pull out of Unesco, the United Nations’ educational and cultural arm, in 1985 under Margaret Thatcher’s government, is increasingly being discussed in Whitehall as a blueprint for withdrawal.

 

Britain rejoined in 1997, under Tony Blair. 

This month the European Research Group of Conservative MPs, led by Chris Heaton-Harris, published a booklet calling for radical changes in Britain’s relationship with the European convention or, if these were not achieved, withdrawal from it.

 

Mr Heaton-Harris said yesterday: “We are sick and tired of decisions by the ECHR which damage the national security of the UK.

 

“Whilst our group would be more radical now, we are pleased with the direction the debate is taking at the moment at the highest level.”

 

As well as Abu Qatada, the ECHR has made a number of highly contentious rulings, which include telling Britain that it had a “legal obligation” to let some prisoners vote.

 

Rupert Massey, who was jailed for sexually abusing boys, was awarded more than £5,000 by the ECHR in 2005 for the “distress and frustration” he had suffered because of the “unreasonable” length of proceedings against him.

Telegraph