The new Bill of Rights: eroding liberties?

The European Court of Human Rights has “arrogated to itself” much more power than it was originally meant to have, said The Daily Telegraph. It was designed to interpret the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), introduced in 1953 to ensure that the horrors of Nazism were never repeated. But it has gone “far beyond” its remit, creating its own laws, above the heads of elected governments. It has, for instance, overruled the UK Government’s decision not to give prisoners the vote, and more recently blocked the deportation of asylum seekers to Rwanda. Now Dominic Raab, the Justice Secretary, has proposed a new UK Bill of Rights, designed to inject “more common sense” into the legal system. It will replace the Human Rights Act passed by Tony Blair in 1998, which first incorporated the ECHR directly into UK law. Raab’s bill makes clear that the “ultimate arbiter” of law in this country is the UK Supreme Court, said The Times. The bill does need careful scrutiny. But it’s a sensible “compromise” that wisely stops short of leaving the ECHR altogether.

No it isn’t sensible, said The Guardian. This is “a retrograde step”, an “erosion of liberty” pursued as part of a long-standing Tory “vendetta” against the Human Rights Act. Raab invokes common sense, but that’s a question “of cultural norms, not universal rights”, and this bill deliberately weakens the latter. While it may not actually pull us out of the European Court of Human Rights, it dilutes the protections the ECHR provides for the vulnerable. It introduces additional hurdles for human rights cases, and makes it easier to deport foreign-born criminals, by chipping away at their right to family life under the Convention. Also chilling is the “authoritarian” and “unprecedented” way the Government is rushing this through, said Merris Amos on The Conversation. This is a “wholesale revision” of our constitution. Usually, such a step would require extensive consultation. Yet Raab introduced a “previously unpublished 44-page constitutional bill” to Parliament, and then held the second reading debate the very next day.

Despite its grandiose title, this is no Bill of Rights, said David Allen Green in Prospect. Instead, it is designed to limit the effectiveness of rights that already exist: its hazy provisions try to make it more difficult to assert them. But the crucial point is that the ECHR will still remain part of domestic law. So anyone who feels that the bill is “reducing or removing” Convention rights will still be able to petition the European Court. Paradoxically, it might mean more cases ending up in Strasbourg. Raab’s Bill of Rights is a waste of time, but it’s not a catastrophe.