European Convention on Human Rights

Baroness Whitaker Excerpts

Thursday 19th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Whitaker]

My Lords, my noble and learned friend Lord Irvine of Lairg has put into brilliant context a most important subject, but one that is stereotyped and made into a ridiculous Eurosceptic nightmare in the pages of the tabloid press and the minds of some people.

The reality is the opposite. The domestication of the European Convention on Human Rights, via the Human Rights Act, far from licensing various kinds of absurd or even criminal behaviour, has achieved respectful, compassionate and fair treatment for very many of our fellow citizens oppressed by systems or bureaucracy or misguided or oppressive elements of the state, as the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, eloquently described. Enemies of red tape and bureaucracy should welcome the Human Rights Act. It is there to give a human dimension back to state operations. It is not, pace noble Lords, primarily for lawyers any more than water is for water engineers. It is for citizens to rely on and public servants to have regard to.

As a board member of the British Institute of Human Rights, I draw some examples of this reality from its experience in training public sector officials such as those working in the NHS or empowering groups such as pensioners to access appropriate facilities fairly. Many of the successes that they have told me of have used the Human Rights Act to avoid going to court.

The parents of a mentally ill son in residential care were not allowed to visit after they complained of unexplained bruising. Human Rights Act training enabled them to challenge this successfully. Children in foster care were not allowed to see their mother, prone to mental ill-health after the death of their father, because of the lack of supervisory staff, to the great distress of both parties. The mother's advocate was trained to argue, successfully, that the children had a right to see their mother. They now remain very close.

Of course, some problems end up in court—I have many more examples of those that do not, but it is important to realise that they can. One such decision was that, before the closure of care homes, effects on the residents must be investigated and their rights safeguarded. Vulnerable old people in all care homes are more secure because of this. Another case overturned the dreadful decision that a woman fleeing her violent husband made herself intentionally homeless.

The courts found that the Mental Health Act 1983 did not comply with the Human Rights Act because it did not put the onus for proving the need for continued detention on the detaining authorities. As your Lordships know, only Parliament can change our laws. In the Joint Committee on Human Rights, we agreed new regulations to redress this plainly oppressive state of affairs. People have had their liberty restored because of this use of the Human Rights Act.

Many of these rights are not absolute. They need to fit in with other rights. The Human Rights Act provides a mechanism for balancing those rights.

Some say that our emerging human rights culture is deficient in the concept of responsibility, but human rights are inextricably also responsibilities. If a person has a right to peaceful enjoyment of their possessions, other people have a responsibility not to interfere with that—the law would notice that. The proper understanding of rights produces socially responsible behaviour and therefore leads to greater social cohesion.

And in our multicultural society, for it is one whatever politicians say, we need one universally accepted set of basic values to share, to underpin our differences, so that we can be equal before the law. The separate faiths cannot all of them provide that; the Human Rights Act can. The fact is that “human rights” is simply an international legal description of what we would in ordinary speech call respect for the dignity of a fellow human being.

Anyone who believes that every person is of equal worth will find in the Human Rights Act the process to safeguard that worth. That is what it is for. That is what the European Convention on Human Rights is for. We could add to the convention rights, for example, jury trial or freedom of speech. We could have something easier, for instance, to teach in schools to fix it in our sense of national identity—a sort of Gettysburg address for Britain. But let us not try to impair it in any way.