European Convention on Human Rights

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Thursday 19th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws]

My Lords, my noble and learned friend Lord Irvine is to be congratulated on the Human Rights Act, which he introduced when Lord Chancellor, and which introduced the European Convention on Human Rights into domestic law. I particularly want to commend this aspect of my noble and learned friend: he did so and then was the Act’s champion in the years thereafter, sometimes in the face of a touch of authoritarianism that came from Home Secretaries, even those whom he sat with in Cabinet. He was a great liberal Lord Chancellor, and I pay tribute to him for the role that he played.

My noble and learned friend reminded us of the gear change that took place back in March 1993 when John Smith gave the Charter 88 lecture, which I had the great privilege of chairing. It was a gear change because John Smith committed the Labour Party then to this change in law and its ability to protect our rights.

When my noble and learned friend Lord Irvine introduced the Second Reading of the Human Rights Bill into this House in 1997, he indicated the weakness of the traditional position of our unwritten constitution. He explained that it gives no protection from the misuse of power by the state, nor from acts or omissions of public bodies that harm individuals in a way that is incompatible with their human rights under the convention. Of course, he was right. I now chair Justice, the lawyers’ organisation that has membership across all parties and none, which has long supported the incorporation of the convention and supported the Human Rights Act. Some 11 years on, it is our view—it is certainly mine—that our constitution is immeasurably the better for that incorporation.

These positive rights are not alien imports, as my noble and learned friend has said; they are largely a distillation of English common law, often misunderstood by many in the public and in the Conservative Party. It was about reintroducing many of our own principles into European law. It was an organised code, drafted by lawyers from our own Foreign Office and by our own parliamentarians. There is a great pamphlet that I recommend to the House, written by Peter Oborne and Jesse Norman—not the opera singer but the Conservative Member of Parliament—describing how the Human Rights Act is rooted in common law.

The first major case in which our domestic judges seriously grappled with this changed world was the Belmarsh case. The judgments of the House of Lords in that case provide a revealing comparison with the infamous decision in Liversidge v Anderson, a case during the Second World War. The point was almost the same: the rights of those who faced internment or imprisonment without trial. Mr Liversidge was a Jewish émigré whose original name was Perlzweig. Because he had changed his name, he became a subject of suspicion and ended up being incarcerated without trial. The earlier case is famous for Lord Atkin’s dissenting speech where he talked about the rule of law and justice prevailing even amid the clash of arms.

The majority of the then House of Lords saw no problem in depriving people of their liberty on the say-so of the Home Secretary. In Belmarsh, though, under the Human Rights Act, the judiciary, led by Lord Bingham, carefully compared what the Government had done with the provisions of the convention and found it wanting. We saw how the common law has been enriched by the incorporation of the European convention.

In this way the Belmarsh judgment demonstrates what my noble and learned friend Lord Irvine had talked about, and talked about again in his Tom Sargant memorial lecture in 1997 where he spoke of the Human Rights Act providing a citizen with the right to assert a positive entitlement and for it to be expressed in clear and principled terms. The incredibly positive thing is that it is provided not just to citizens but to any human being. As the right reverend Prelate says, the Act recognises the moral significance of every person, not just citizens.

The convention has proved its worth in the intervening decade. It has encouraged our judiciary seriously to hold the Government to account, particularly with regard to their approach to terrorism. I see that from my own experience in those cases. Indeed, the European Court established by the convention has given the domestic judiciary a lesson in how to interpret the convention in key decisions, where their own domestic decisions were too deferential to the Government of the day. Those included the retention of DNA taken by the police from innocent people; the misuse of police powers under the Terrorism Act, in the case of Gillan; and the extent of control orders, in the case of A. They are all cases where the judges of the European Court were bolder than our judiciary, which is always being complained about. In my view, the European Court was correct there.

In a small number of cases, the jurisdiction of the European Court has been challenged as having gone too far, and some of them have been mentioned today. There has been considerable adverse comment against the decision in Chahal that the prohibition against torture should extend to a prohibition against a state effectively conniving in torture by sending someone back to a state where there is a reasonable likelihood that they will be tortured. In the light of what we now know about the US extraordinary rendition programme, how right that decision was—and how shameful that the UK Government thought to intervene in another case, Saadi v Italy, to overthrow the principle.

The Arab spring has shown us the true nature of a number of the regimes to which the UK wanted to expel people. For example, there can now be few illusions about the regime of Colonel Gaddafi or about the true nature of his English-educated son. Yet the UK wanted to close its eyes to the reality and send people back on the basis of undertakings that were likely to be of little worth. It took the courts to express scepticism of the value of undertakings from such sources in the cases of AS and DD, and in a case that I was involved in to do with possible undertakings from Pakistan.

The European Court of Human Rights is an important part of the apparatus of the ECHR. Its doctrine that the convention is a living instrument has kept it up to date and avoided some of the absurd originalism associated with the American constitution. Its value has to be recognised. I accept that there are problems around the issue of the margin of appreciation. I hope we will be able to visit that in our commission, which I sit on and which will look at how the court’s decisions should deploy that doctrine. Another issue concerns judicial dialogue. I hope there can be more of that in the case of Horncastle, which is currently before the European Court’s final chamber. It is a case that we should follow with some interest.

Finally, the convention is to be welcomed. The new commission that will look at a British Bill of Rights recognises that there is a guaranteed floor—the ECHR. We as a country have gained immeasurably from the way in which the Human Rights Act has brought it more visibly into our constitution. In proclaiming his crucial role in this process, I salute the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine.