A laudable project to stop rebirth of Nazism panders to ideological ambulance-chasers

Another day, another foreign legal opinion deliberately aimed at undermining law passed by the elected House of Commons. How have such seemingly laudable projects as a European Court of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights led to such a political crisis within the very home of Magna Carta and in the Mother of Parliaments?

In one of his several acts of constitutional vandalism, Sir Tony Blair’s 1998 Human Rights Act compels British Government ministers to declare that every proposed piece of Westminster legislation is compatible with the convention as interpreted by an increasingly questionable court in Strasbourg. This was described at the time by Lord Mccluskey, a former Labour government solicitor-general, as “a field day for crackpots”, “a pain in the neck for judges and legislators” and “a goldmine for lawyers”.

How right he has proved to be. The reality is that, despite wishful thinking and long-rehearsed soundbites by their ideological supporters, both the Convention and Court were deeply controversial at their inception over 70 years ago and remain so today.

There are those who point to the fact that Conservative statesmen and lawyers, including Winston Churchill and David Maxwell Fyfe, a future Lord Chancellor, were the midwives of the ECHR. This is true. What is also true is that if Churchill was about anything, it was that parliamentary sovereignty was supreme. He would be spinning in his grave at the way the convention has been corrupted in order to humiliate the United Kingdom in pursuit of Strasbourg’s Ngo-driven agenda.

For all the Labour Party’s contemporary lauding of the Convention and Court, it is also worth placing on record that, all through the Convention’s gestation, Clement Atlee’s post-war Labour government loitered in the wings trying to kill Churchill’s baby off before birth.

British civil servants at the time feared that the court would become a “small paradise” for claims from “communists, crooks and cranks of every type”. Lord Jowitt, Atlee’s Lord Chancellor, declared the convention to be “meaningless and dangerous.”

He stated further: “We were not prepared . . . to jeopardise our whole system of law . . . in favour of some half-baked scheme to be administered by some unknown court.”

Jowitt’s warning that the convention would “obviously compromise the sovereignty of parliament” was prescient. It has. Whatever its provenance, the purpose envisaged for the convention in 1950 and the ECHR that was to follow in 1959 was clear

– an agreement on basic human rights to forestall any resurgence of the horrors of National Socialism and Marxism that had led to the deaths of millions of Europeans and the suffering of millions more.

The Court was designed to protect against any convention signatory sliding back into totalitarianism. It has instead become, as Lord Cameron observed in 2012, “a small claims court” – albeit one pandering to ideological ambulance-chasers.

Lord Lester QC has described what had passed for Strasbourg jurisprudence as “standardless”, “as slippery and elusive as an eel” and “a substitute for coherent legal analysis.”

The United Kingdom must leave the jurisdiction of this foreign court as soon as possible.

Sarah Dines is a barrister and former Home Office and Justice minister