I sometimes wonder whether the judges in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg are deliberately trying to provoke a crisis with the United Kingdom.
On Tuesday, the Court issued a judgement that the ‘whole-life’ prison terms (‘tariffs’) imposed on a small group of Britain’s most horrible murderers were themselves unlawful and incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights, unless there was a ‘dedicated review mechanism’.
The judges said if there was no prospect of release, there was a risk the prisoner ‘can never atone for his offence’.
This ruling comes on top of one which declared that it was unlawful for convicted serving prisoners to be denied the right to vote whilst they were in prison.
The Court, and the Convention, were established in the aftermath of the last war to protect truly basic human rights – like, fair trials, no torture, and so on. The UK was in the lead in saying this – indeed it was Winston Churchill’s Lord Chancellor (Lord Kilmuir) who drafted the Convention’s text. So we shouldn’t complain too much if the Court stops a Home Secretary from deporting someone because of fears that they might be tortured – we signed up for that.
But we never signed up for the extraordinary extension of the jurisdiction of the Court into areas which should be left to national democracy.
The Court has even gone as far as claiming that night flights at Heathrow involved basic human rights. In short, the Strasbourg Court has turned itself into a Supreme Court for Europe – but without our agreement, and without the democratic override to which national Supreme Courts are subject.
Bluntly, how long our worst murderers should spend in prison is none of the Court’s business. It’s for the people, the British Parliament, and our courts to decide that there are some murderers whose crimes are so bad they should never be released.
The Strasbourg Court has been wilfully pushing its luck at a time when the trend across much of the continent is for less Europe, not more. It’s a dangerous game, from which they will ultimately be the loser.
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