Public safety wins out over prisoners’ rights
New Bill’s reforms could put convicts behind bars for longer if they are deemed to be a risk
DANGEROUS criminals could face longer jail terms under a new British Bill of Rights that will prioritise the safety of the public.
The Bill lays down in law that courts must give precedence to “reducing the risk to the public” over the human rights of an offender.
The changes will underpin a tougher approach to parole for some prisoners. The legislation will also tackle the treatment of extremists in prison, challenges to deportation by foreign convicts and the awarding of damages to people with criminal records.
The Bill, published yesterday, states that “any court must give the greatest possible weight to the importance of reducing the risk to the public from persons who have committed offences in respect of which custodial sentences have been imposed”.
It will frame legislation, due to be published later this year, overhauling the Parole Board to prevent a repeat of scandals such as the release of Colin Pitchfork, a double child murderer, and an abortive decision to free John Worboys, the black cab rapist. The law will tighten the criteria under which offenders are released so that a Parole Board’s judgment can be overruled if it was felt safer to keep them behind bars.
The Bill of Rights, once law, would restrict the ability of any offender to claim the decision to keep them in jail amounted to a breach of their rights.
Under the parole reforms, Mr Raab is also taking back the power to block the release of high-risk criminals that was previously held by ministers.
It ended after legal challenges in Europe and the UK claimed it was a breach of prisoners’ human rights to let politicians rather than judges determine sentence lengths. The Bill also paves the way for more terrorists to be held in “jails within jails” in an attempt to stop hate preachers influencing other prisoners.
Dominic Raab, the Justice Secretary, plans to expand the use of “separation centres” within high security prisons to keep more vulnerable prisoners safe.
The Bill will reduce the ability of lawyers to use human rights laws to claim that separating them from other prisoners breaches their rights to socialise.
In one case, Jemmikai Orlebarforbes, 28, a convicted killer, was awarded £15,000 from the Government after claiming a breach of his Article 8 rights when he was segregated with other terror offenders at HMP Frankland in Co Durham.
Claims for damages by criminals or prisoners will also be restricted by giving courts the discretion to take account of their offences when deciding how much to pay out.
“Courts will have wide discretion in how to take into account relevant past conduct of the claimant in the awarding of any damages, as part of all the circumstances of the case,” said Mr Raab.
Cases have included a triple killer who won £815 compensation after accusing prison guards of damaging his nose hair clippers and a rapist who cost the state thousands of pounds after claiming that his health was put at risk by sharing a cell with a smoker.
The new provision giving primacy to public safety will also reinforce clauses in the Bill that make it easier to deport foreign criminals by restricting their ability to claim it breaches their right to a family life. “The longer the sentence you have the less likely you are to be able to establish that you have an ongoing and subsisting set of ties with a dependent that could mean they are really reliant on you staying in the country,” said a source.
Mr Raab told MPS yesterday: “We are at risk of losing public confidence in our immigration controls if we can’t take the common sense measures they expect, and we’re also at risk of losing public confidence in human rights if we don’t restore a healthy dose of common sense.”
ABill of Rights has great historical resonance. The 1688 version, while limiting the freedoms of Roman Catholics and women, was nonetheless a foundation stone of British liberties along with habeas corpus, trial by jury and limits on the executive power of the state.
Modified and expanded, these liberties have existed in this country much longer than they have in much of continental Europe. After the Second World War, they were the basis for the European Convention on Human Rights which was intended to ensure the horrors of the mid-20th century were never again inflicted on people because of their race or religion or other minority status.
The final interpretation of the convention was assumed by the European Court of Human Rights before the Human Rights Act (HRA) made them once again justiciable by British courts, albeit with an appeal to Strasbourg still available. As has been seen recently with the Rwandan asylum removals, a domestic judicial decision can be overruled.
It is against this background that Dominic Raab, the Lord Chancellor, published his British Bill of Rights essentially to supplant the Human Rights Act and reduce the influence of a supra-national court that has arrogated to itself far more power than was ever envisaged. It has moved beyond interpreting the convention into creating laws of its own in contravention of the principle that such responsibilities lie with elected parliaments.
This is why the responses to Mr Raab’s Bill from the human rights lobby are preposterous. Amnesty International said the proposed new statute would “fatally weaken human rights” while other campaigners fatuously condemned the “ripping up” of liberties. Yet we are not withdrawing from the convention and, in any case, we possessed the rights it contains long before it came into effect in 1953. We do not need to submit to the edicts of the Strasbourg court in order to defend them.
Indeed, the new Bill will strengthen rights in some areas, including specific protections for free speech and trial by jury. Courts will no longer be required to place costly obligations on public authorities actively to protect individual human rights. There is a good deal of British pragmatism and what Mr Raab called “a healthy dose of common sense” here that might rescue what is a noble cause from the human rights industry.
A new balance is needed between traditional British rights and the judicial activism of the Strasbourg court. This Bill should help provide it.