Rights Act getting it wrong too often
LEVI Bellfield is serving a whole life term for the murder of three people, including a child of 13, and the attempted murder of another and now wishes to get married to someone who has been visiting him. Amidst all the outrage about how distasteful this is nobody seems to have realised how utterly pointless it is too. There can be no marriage in any meaningful sense of the word.
Married people live together but Bellfield lives in prison so that is out of the question. Married people have intimate relations but there is no provision for conjugal visits in UK prisons, so the union can never be consummated. If he were serving a finite sentence the woman could claim to be waiting for him but he is in prison until death do them part. In short, any marriage would be an utter sham.
Yet under the Human Rights Act, his wish for that sham must be granted. When the then Blair Government decided to incorporate the European Human Rights Act into our own law, I said, as Shadow Home Secretary, that we would watch what happened and if a lot of nonsense followed then a future Tory Government would repeal it. A lot of nonsense has indeed followed and repeal is badly overdue.
WE HAVE had many instances of criminals citing their right to a family life to avoid deportation. Indeed, Abu Hamza, the radical hate preacher, relied on the Human Rights Act to resist deportation for a very long time on the dubious grounds that the American justice system would expose him to torture.
We seem to assume that there is a right never to be offended or hurt or to feel insulted and to cry “human rights” at the drop of a disobliging word. Yet the most fundamental right of all, that to life itself, is casually dispensed with for, say, Down’s babies just before birth. Such contradictions will be difficult to codify in any replacement Act but what we have at the moment is nothing short of a farce.