Ministers drop plan for human rights authority
By Jon Hibbs, Political Correspondent
MINISTERS have dropped plans for a powerful Human Rights Commission to champion the interests of individuals against the state once the European Convention becomes part of British law.
They fear that the creation of a new umbrella organisation will unleash a flood of legal claims against the Government and threaten the traditional supremacy of Parliament. The decision will disappoint civil liberties campaigners who believe that Labour’s manifesto commitment to repatriate human rights from the European Court in Strasbourg will be undermined without a strong central organisation to enforce them.
Lord Irvine, the Lord Chancellor, who chairs a special Cabinet committee on incorporating European rights into domestic law, reaffirmed the Government’s commitment to the legislation in his first major speech in the job yesterday. He said it would give judges, magistrates and tribunals in Britain greater powers to protect individuals against abuse of state power. Ministers believe the Bill is the most far-reaching of all the measures foreshadowed in the first Queen’s Speech and are anxious to stimulate public debate on its implications.
The Court in Strasbourg is independent of the European Court of Justice, the body that enforces European Union law. Detailed proposals for entrenching human rights in Britain will be unveiled in the autumn. Britain signed the European Convention in 1950 but its citizens have been able to assert their rights to privacy, a fair trial, or freedom of expression only through the lengthy and costly process of applying to the court in Strasbourg.
Incorporation would allow British courts to rule whether human rights had been infringed, not only saving time and money but ensuring decisions took greater account of British legal and constitutional traditions. In recent years, there has been a rapid increase in the number of cases brought against the Government in Strasbourg, and violations of the Convention by the UK were upheld in five out of 11 cases in the last 12 months.
Nine other cases against the UK are still pending and 180 outstanding complaints to the European Commission on Human Rights, which vets applications to the court. The idea of setting up an over-arching Human Rights Commission in Britain was put forward in a Labour party policy document before the election and has been endorsed by the influential Left-leaning think-tank, the Institute of Public Policy Research. But Lord Irvine signalled that, for the moment, ministers wanted to leave existing institutions as they are, while monitoring the new system through a Joint Committee on Human Rights of both Houses of Parliament.
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