The recent vote in Parliament to reject the ruling from the European Court of Human Rights, that convicted criminals in British gaols be given the vote, was welcomed by many of us as a breath of fresh air and a victory for common sense. We can only hope that the government will now have the balls to follow through and repeal the iniquitous and undemocratic Human Rights Act 2000, which signed so many of our historic rights for self-determination over to Strasbourg.
Time and time again over the past decade, the court’s rulings have made a mockery of decisions taken by our Parliament and courts. In the process, “human rights” have become synonymous with politically correct judgements that fly in the face of common sense and the British people. We have been prevented, on the most spurious grounds, from deporting evil terrorists and foreign-born criminals who have committed serious crimes. Millions of pounds have been paid in compensation to criminals over footling denials of their ‘rights’ while their victims have received nothing.
Only recently, thanks to the Convention, a failed asylum seeker from Tanzania was granted her ‘human right’ to stay in Britain on the grounds that since coming here illegally, she’d given birth to two children by a married man living on disability benefits, with HIV and a drink problem.
The irony is that the European ‘court’ is nothing of the sort. Incredibly, 20 of its 47 ‘representatives’ have no prior judicial experience in their homeland. The ‘one country, one judge’ rule means that Liechtenstein, San Marino, Monaco and Andorra each have a seat on the bench, despite their combined populations being smaller than the London borough of Islington. Worse, some of the judges represent undemocratic countries with appalling records on human rights. Nine judges, including those from Azerbaijan and Russia, are from nations internationally categorised by Freedom House as ‘not free’ or only ‘partly free’. Yet they are allowed to dictate the laws of Britain — a country with 60million people, which invented the concept of human rights hundreds of years ago.
Just in case anyone doubts what we are saying here, these are a few of the Court's judgements that have affected the working of normal law in the country in recent years ...
• Abu Qatada, Al Qaeda’s chief European agent, was paid £2,500 for being ‘unlawfully detained’, after being held indefinitely without trial following the September 11 attacks. Despite the Strasbourg court accepting him as a threat to the nation, a ruling found that keeping him in Belmarsh prison, while he refused to return to his native Jordan, breached his human right to a fair trial. The British government has since changed tack and is now trying to deport him to Jordan, where he has been sentenced to jail in his absence on terror charges.
• Britain's power to send foreign terrorists and criminals home was destroyed by the 1996 Strasbourg ruling over Karamjit Chahal. The Sikh activist fled to Britain after being wanted for sedition in India. He successfully blocked deportation to India, claiming he could face torture, and Strasbourg ruled he must remain in Britain. Since this landmark case, hundreds of criminals have been able to stay, costing millions of pounds in benefits and, according to Lord Carlisle, Britain’s independent reviewer of anti-terror laws, making this country a ‘safe haven for terrorists’.
• Hook-handed Muslim cleric Abu Hamza is wanted in the U.S. for plotting to set up a terror camp there. Extradition proceedings began in Britain six years ago. Hamza appealed to Strasbourg to block being sent to America, claiming that if he was extradited it would breach his human right to a fair trial. He claims he would be given an ‘excessive’ sentence. Strasbourg has yet to hear the case and, in the meantime, the taxpayer has forked out £1.5?million for his stay in Belmarsh and legal aid. Also, his wife and eight children are claiming £680 a week in benefits and living in a council home in West London. The case has cast a long shadow over British extradition laws and whether Britain can ever send suspected criminals to the U.S. (unless, of course, they actually are British like Gary McKinnon, in which case our courts and government are happy enough to betray the safety of a vulnerable citizen).
• Career criminal Stuart Blackstock gunned down unarmed PC Philip Olds in a 1980 robbery. Olds’ brave struggle to overcome his paralysis captured the public’s support but tragically ended in a drugs overdose after six years. Blackstock won £7,000 in 2005 after he complained about minor delays in his prison release under Strasbourg’s fair trial rules. The case showed the judges were ready to offend deeply-held public opinion in Britain.
• Dennis Stafford's 1967 shooting of a fruit machine cash collector inspired the Michael Caine film “Get Carter” but also changed British murder law for ever. Until this case, the Home Secretary had the right to decide when a murderer should be released from jail. He held the power as a guarantee given to the British people when the death penalty was abolished — to ensure that murderers would remain behind bars for as long as they were still a danger to the public. But Strasbourg said an independent court, free of political interference, must make the decision when to release killers under fair trial rules. Judges have since been obliged to reduce jail terms for murders.
• Over two decades there has been a spiralling number of sham marriages where illegal immigrants have exploited lax wedding law to enter and remain in Britain by becoming a spouse of a British or EU citizen. In 2004, the Home Office insisted immigrants had to obtain a certificate of approval to prove their relationship was genuine and pay a £25 fee. It was credited with cutting the number of sham marriages by more than 70 per cent. But a series of Strasbourg judgments, in cases brought by immigrants who claimed the rules breached their human right to marry, undermined the system and it was abandoned last year. It is feared the change could lead to a worrying rise in bogus weddings.
• Rupert Massey, jailed for six years for sexually abusing three schoolboys, claimed the four years it took to bring him to court had left him ‘stressed’ and infringed his right to a fair trial. He was awarded nearly £6,000 — the amount in compensation given to one of his victims.
• Centuries-old rules banning marriage between children and their parents-in-law were swept aside in a 2005 ruling. Strasbourg deemed the right to marry was infringed in the case of a 37-year-old woman who wanted to wed her 58-year-old father-in-law. In Britain, the ban had been cemented in law for more than 400 years in the Book of Common Prayer.
• Princess Caroline of Monaco persuaded judges in 2004 that paparazzi who snapped her on a German street with her family, had invaded her privacy. The decision is now applied in Britain — reversing without reference to Parliament the long-standing understanding that there can be no expectation of privacy in a street open to the public. It severely curtailed Press freedom.
• In 2006 the Home Office settled out of court over claims by dozens of prisoners that they should have been allowed to use heroin substitute methadone. The case never went to trial — but the Labour government settled after it was told Strasbourg would have ruled that not to do so would have been degrading for the prisoners. The case cost the taxpayer £1million in compensation. It now means that drug addicted prisoners must be given methadone, costing £110million every year.
• A series of Strasbourg judgments have hampered investigations by insisting that bugging of suspects and even opening their mail can breach their right to privacy, however serious the crime. Gordon Foxley took £1.5million in bribes from foreign arms firms while working at the Ministry of Defence and his corruption led to nearly 1,000 workers losing their jobs. But after spending just two years in jail, he was also awarded £6,000 costs after a ruling that police had wrongly intercepted his post. Similarly, drugs baron Sean Taylor-Sabori was handed £3,000 for invasion of privacy because police read messages sent to his pager.
• Three IRA terrorists shot dead by the SAS in Gibraltar in 1988 were wrongly killed, the Euro-judges said, ruling that this breached their right to life. The 1995 ruling outraged the public because they were an experienced hit squad with long terror records who had left a car filled with explosives across the border in Spain. The SAS soldiers believed they were ready to detonate the bomb, but it turned out their mission was reconnaisance. The taxpayer was left with a £38,000 legal bill for the terrorists’ families.
• As early as 1978, the Strasbourg court was using its powers to curb corporal punishment of children. Judges outlawed the use of the birch as a punishment for teenagers meted out by Isle of Man courts. Then in 1982, it ruled in favour of two Scottish parents who wanted to stop corporal punishment being used in schools their children attended. They claimed it breached their right to determine the nature of their children’s education. Four years later, such punishment was banned in English schools. Then in a 1998 test case, a stepfather who caned a boy was ruled to have infringed his right not to suffer ‘inhuman or degrading’ treatment.
The decision undermined Britain’s ‘reasonable chastisement’ law which allowed parents to smack and has led to severe limits on corporal punishment by parents, to the extent that you may not bruise a child. There are signs that the Court may wish to go further in future and make it illegal to physically discipline your children altogether.
• Soviet spy George Blake was jailed for 42 years, one for each of the MI6 agents he sent to their deaths. He escaped from Wormwood Scrubs and later wrote his memoirs in Russia. He was given £4,700 compensation in 2006 because Britain breached his right to free expression by trying to stop him making money from the book.
• British families of soldiers abroad had a right to be tried under British military law — until Euro-judges swept away hundreds of years of tradition in the case of teenage murderer Alan Martin. The son of a corporal killed an Army computer expert while she was out jogging in Germany. He was awarded £5,000 costs after it was ruled his court martial was not independent and thus not a fair trial. It now means that any crime committed by a soldier’s relative while stationed abroad will face local law.
• The argument over night flights at Heathrow has occupied MPs, planners and the aviation industry for years. But in 2001 Strasbourg stepped in, saying that the flights breached the family life human rights of residents below, costing airlines £30 million a year as the number of flights into the airport have been limited and daytime runway slots are more expensive. Thousands of jobs were put at risk.
• A Yorkshire civil servant who was filmed in an orgy with four other men was convicted of gross indecency. Wrong, said Strasbourg, handing him £33,000 discrimination compensation. The old gross indecency law was ruled discriminatory as it did not apply to women. As a consequence, in 2003 a whole new raft of sex offences were enshrined in British law. Gay orgies are no longer illegal.
• In 1998, Strasbourg handed down a judgment that opened British police forces to an endless stream of compensation cases. A mentally ill teacher shot and injured a pupil. He then went on to shoot and kill the boy’s father. When the boy’s family claimed the police had failed to protect them from the armed teacher, who was known by the authorities to be obsessed with the boy, British courts said that officers had done nothing wrong. Strasbourg overruled British judges and said they had failed to live up their duty to ‘do everything that can be reasonably expected of them to avoid a real and immediate risk to life’. Strasbourg also said it should be easier to bring compensation claims against the police in this country. Since then fearful police forces have created an edifice of red tape and defensive legal rules to protect themselves from such actions.
• Murderer and prisoner Kirk Dickson spent £20,000 in legal aid winning the right to father children with artificial insemination in 2007. He hoped to have a child with another former prisoner, fraudster Lorraine Earlie. The ban on prisoners using artificial insemination in Britain breached the right to family life because Ms Earlie would have been too old to have a child by the time Dickson was released. The relaxation of the law is expected to lead to a future Strasbourg judgment allowing conjugal visits in jail.
• Prison officers looking for drugs may no longer strip-search people visiting relatives. Mary Wainwright and her son Alan, 31, were subjected to unnecessary and undignified searches at Armley jail in Leeds, judges said. The ruling damaged the relentless fight against contraband being smuggled in jails, which are awash with drugs.
• IRA terrorist and murderer Liam Averill won £5,000 in legal costs in 2000. Averill had escaped from prison dressed as a woman, after a Christmas party. He was still on the run when Strasbourg said it was wrong that he had no lawyer for 24 hours after his arrest. After 11 years, he is still missing.
• Elderly sisters Joyce and Sybil Burden have lived together all their lives, aged 90 and 82 respectively when they brought a case for the same inheritance rights as gay civil partners in 2008. Under British law, when one of them died, the other would have to sell their £875,000 house to meet the £236,000 inheritance tax bill. Strasbourg turned down their plea simply because they are not lesbians, and disregarded the time they had spent living with each other. Joyce said ‘Because we are single, we have got no rights at all,’ which is true. It's also tempting to think that the sisters were being discriminated against because they were not lesbians. Recent court rulings have indeed revealed that in this country gays and lesbians have more rights than ordinary people.
• A ruling against Belgium last month means Britain will be unable to deport failed asylum seekers to Greece. Under European law, Britain must send failed asylum seekers back to the country through which they first came in to the EU. For many hundreds, this is Greece. In ruling in the case of an Afghan asylum seeker, Strasbourg said Greek jails were degrading and the country allowed asylum seekers to become destitute. This means that all who come to Britain through Greece will be able to stay in the UK in future, and asylum seekers will be stupid if they come to Britain by any other route as arriving from Greece will guarantee their acceptance in this country.
A pretty sorry series of tales, we think you'll agree. It's not really important what one thinks about the individual issues - for instance, we personally couldn't give a toss about the Yorkshire civil servant and his pansy little friends. If they want to spend the evening fiddling about with each other's privates, we despise them but we couldn't be arsed to stop them. Why should we? What harm do they do?
No, the important thing is that these are matters for us to decide. They concern what happens within the borders of Britain, and the only people who should decide what happens in Britain are our parliament, our police, our courts, and our public opinion. Right or wrong (wrong, usually), they're ours and we'll either put up with them or, eventually, change them. The last time we thought there was any danger of foreigners dictating what we should do in our own country, we fought a World War with them. Let's not forget that; this is a ridiculous little country where many ridiculous things happen, and we tolerate rubbish that would cause riot and revolution in most other nations, but we are proud of our capacity for stubborn resistance. High time we started doing what we're good at - being bloody-minded.
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