British ministers will be able to ignore rulings from the European Court of Human Rights under new legislation introduced by Boris Johnson’s government. The legislation, which the government has called a Bill of Rights, comes a week after the Strasbourg-based court blocked the first flight of asylum seekers from Britain to Rwanda in a controversial scheme to offshore the asylum process.
It makes changes to the Human Rights Act, which introduced into British law the rights contained in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), making it harder for people to make human rights claims. Claimants would have to prove at an early stage that they had suffered a significant disadvantage and courts would consider their previous behaviour before awarding damages.
Justice secretary Dominic Raab said Britain would remain a state party to the convention on human rights but wanted to deal with what he described as its elastic interpretation and expansion.
“We have seen the goalposts on human rights shift over time through expanded judicial interpretations, licensed by the Human Rights Act, which has tended to magnify overweening rulings from Strasbourg, although it is worth noting in fairness that there has been more judicial restraint in Strasbourg on occasion in recent times. Nevertheless, what ebbs may flow, and we will ensure in our Bill of Rights that any expansion of human rights law — as opposed to its interpretation — is subject to proper democratic oversight by elected members in this House,” he told MPs.
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“We will be crystal clear that when it comes to the laws of the land, and the legitimate, necessary and constructive dialogue we have with Strasbourg, it is parliament that has the last word.”
Belfast Agreement
Alliance MP Stephen Farry reminded Mr Raab that ECHR rights, which have nothing to do with the European Union, are written into the Belfast Agreement and underpin judicial co-operation between Britain and other European countries.
“I do not think the justice secretary has fully thought through the implications for mutual extradition arrangements across Europe, including those under the trade and co-operation agreement. It is important to stress that the Good Friday agreement applies the full effect of the convention, not the convention in name only. Does he understand that confidence in the new policing and criminal justice arrangements in Northern Ireland, including on legacy cases, is very heavily predicated on full adherence to the European convention?” Mr Farry said.
The Law Society, which represents solicitors in England and Wales, said the Bill signalled a deepening of the government’s disregard for the checks and balances that underpin the rule of law.
“The Bill will create an acceptable class of human rights abuses in the United Kingdom — by introducing a bar on claims deemed not to cause ‘significant disadvantage’. It is a lurch backwards for British justice. Authorities may begin to consider some rights violations as acceptable, because these could no longer be challenged under the Bill of Rights despite being against the law,” the society’s president I Stephanie Boyce said.
“Overall, the Bill would grant the state greater unfettered power over the people, power which would then belong to all future governments, whatever their ideologies.”
