Just days after a judge in Strasbourg halted the deportation of asylum seekers from Britain to Rwanda, Downing Street will draw up sweeping plans to overturn the power of Europe’s human rights court.
elimination of human rights act (HRA), including reducing the impact of European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), will be presented before Parliament in what the government has described as a reaffirmation of Britain’s sovereignty.
But campaigners and prominent lawyers condemned the historic move, saying the government was systematically eroding people’s rights by the courts in an attempt to make themselves “untouchables”.
They fear the new British Bill of Rights will not have the same protections.
Sacha Deshmukh, Chief Executive of Amnesty International UK, said: “The [Strasbourg] The court’s intervention in Rwanda’s deportation last week was an example of it playing its fundamental role in ensuring that basic human rights are not violated, citing nothing more that the UK has to wait pending the outcome of our in-house judicial review process. The removal of Rwanda should be stopped while doing so.
“It is very disturbing that the UK government is prepared to damage the dignity of power” European Court of Human Rights Because of a decision he doesn’t like.
“It is not about tampering with rights, it is about taking them away.
“From Hillsborough Disasterfor the right of a proper covid testFor the right to challenge the method of conducting endemic checks by the police cruelty against womenHuman Rights Act is the cornerstone of manpower in this country. It is no coincidence that the politicians who have this account want to see it mortally weakened.”
A senior government source last week acknowledged Rwanda’s decision, which humiliated ministers, was a factor.
“Some of the problems or challenges we have faced (with respect to Rwanda) have strengthened and strengthened the case for what we are doing,” the source said.
The government said the bill would clarify that interim measures from the ECHR such as those issued last week, which halted the flight to Rwanda, are not binding on UK courts.
The source said that “sovereignty has been fragmented and called into question over the years by a combination of other supranational bodies including the European Union and the Strasbourg Court”.
However, UK courts are not bound to follow the ECHR’s rulings and critics say other changes will have more meaningful, negative effects.
Stephanie Boyce, president of the Law Society of England and Wales, said: “The erosion of accountability trumpeted by the Secretary of Justice indicates the government’s disregard for the controls and balances that underpin the rule of law.
“By introducing the bill – will create an acceptable class of human rights abuses in the United Kingdom” [under a new permission stage] The claims are not once considered to have caused ‘significant harm’.
“This is backwards for British justice. Officials may begin to recognize certain rights violations as acceptable, as these can no longer be challenged under the Bill of Rights, even though they are against the law.
“Overall, the bill would give the state more autocratic power over the people, a power that would then belong to all future governments, regardless of their ideology.”
Liberty’s policy and campaign officer Jun Pang said: “The government is repeatedly trying to change the rules to make itself untouchable, and the Rwanda plan is a good example of this.
“This is the latest example, but there are countless examples of government tightening the rights of the people, be it on the streets, in the courts, in the ballot box or in Parliament.
“The Bill of Rights will result in a denial of rights and undermine the protections of all, but will obviously have the greatest impact on already marginalized communities.”
The government said the bill would ensure that courts consider a claimant’s relevant conduct, such as a prisoner’s violent or criminal behavior, when awarding damages, and would make it easier to deport foreign offenders by enabling future immigration laws that would would force them to prove that a child or dependent would cause enormous, unavoidable harm if they were removed from the country.
It also said that it would promote freedom of the press by elevating the right to freedom of expression over the right to privacy, which has restricted reporting in recent yearsand launching a stronger trial for courts to consider before ordering journalists to disclose their sources.
The UK will remain a signatory to European Convention on Human Rightswhich the HRA incorporated into domestic law, but the government said the act prompted courts to “remove, reinterpret or dilute the effects of the primary law”.
Justice Secretary, Dominic Raab, said: “The Bill of Rights will strengthen our UK tradition of freedom while injecting a healthy dose of common sense into the system.
“These reforms will strengthen freedom of speech, enable us to deport more foreign criminals, and better protect the public from dangerous criminals.”
Prof. Philip Sands QCwho sat on the 2013 Commission on the Bill of Rights, said: “Mr Raab embraces a nationalist and xenophobic spin on the idea of human rights, highlighting one of its most fundamental principles: the basis of human rights for all.” exist, and should be enforceable at the behest of all. The government wants to turn the clock back to the pre-1945 era, a time when, as writer Joseph Roth put it, ‘the graves of world history yawned open’ … and all the corpses which were thought to be one are coming out.'”