Attorney General admits UK could leave rights convention
THE UK could pull out of Europewide human rights laws within the next five years unless reforms are made, the Government’s senior law officer has indicated.
Attorney General Jeremy Wright said he did not know whether the UK would still be a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights at the end of the current parliament.
Justice Secretary Michael Gove has promised to set out this autumn the Government’s proposals to scrap the Human Rights Act – which enshrines the convention in British law – and replace it with a British Bill of Rights.
Appearing before MPs, Mr Wright was asked whether he thought the UK would remain signed up to the convention at the end of the parliament.
“The honest answer to that is I don’t know,” he told MPs. “A lot depends on what new settlement we can reach with the European convention mechanism.”
Appearing before the Justice Select Committee, Mr Wright insisted that the Government’s respect for human rights did not solely depend on membership of the convention.
But he said repeated controversial rulings from judges at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg meant that the status quo was “not sustainable”.
“I don’t think that there is anybody, including anybody in Government, who has a serious issue with the content of the convention,” he said
“The convention is a document that I think encapsulates some of the most fundamental human rights that we would all support and wish to continue supporting.”
He added: It is the interpretation of that document and the Strasbourg jurisprudence that goes with that interpretation that I think this Government would wish to challenge and to seek to alter in terms of its effect on this country.
“So a lot will depend on whether or not we can reach an accommodation with the Council of Europe which means that we can gain some greater freedom in terms of the way in which the human rights convention is interpreted by the Strasbourg court than we have at the moment.”
He added: “The status quo – which is that we receive a number of judgments from Strasbourg which don’t represent what we think is a realistic and sensible view of human rights applicable to this country – that status quo is not sustainable and we have to do something about it.”
That status quo is
not sustainable Attorney General Jeremy Wright