Voting by Prisoners

Debate between David Ruffley and Jack Straw

Thursday 10th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Straw]

I shall give way to the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds (Mr Ruffley), but then I must make some progress.

[Mr Ruffley]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman. Is not the essential problem that the European Court in Strasbourg became an appellate court for British cases in 1965—not in 1950—and that that was decided by a British Cabinet without any debate in this House?

[Mr Straw]

I was not in the House in 1965. [Hon. Members: “Are you sure?”] I was causing trouble at universities at the time, so I have an alibi—I was at the scene of some other crimes.

I do not quite subscribe to the hon. Gentleman’s view about that piece of history. The signing of the protocol that gave the Court that power was very public. Anyway, where we are is where we are, and subsequent Administrations of either persuasion have not objected to the Court’s having that power of what amounts to individual petition.

Our Human Rights Act was expertly drafted, giving our courts the power to declare primary legislation incompatible with the convention but no power to strike down that legislation. In that way, the sovereignty of Parliament is respected and indeed protected by the Act. Our senior judiciary, without question among the best in the world, have applied the Act with the sensitivity that one would expect. As the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden said a moment ago, when the British courts first considered the Hirst case, prior to its going to Strasbourg, they found no breach of the convention whatever. In addition, they said that any change in the law was a matter for Parliament. For the avoidance of doubt, let me put it firmly on record that the tension and conflict that we have to resolve today can in no sense be laid at the door of the Human Rights Act or, in my judgment, at that of the plain text of the convention.