European Convention on Human Rights: UK Membership

David Winnick Excerpts

Tuesday 26th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Winnick (Walsall North) (Lab)]

Post-1945 Europe should be proud to have such a convention, which has existed for so many years. If the argument is that from time to time, the judgments are faulty, what about judgments in this country, such as those in the cases of the Birmingham six and the Guildford four? Surely, they were hardly an argument for changing our judicial system. The reason the Attorney General is putting this forward, whether or not it represents his own personal and political views, is that there is an extreme element in the Conservative party that deeply resented having the convention in the first place.

[The Attorney General]

The hon. Gentleman is right to say that no court system is perfect. All systems are capable of making mistakes, and we should be grateful for the fact that our judicial system permits those mistakes to be corrected, as they were in the cases that he mentioned. I do not think that that is comparable to the exercise that has been conducted by Strasbourg jurisprudence on the European convention on human rights, which has moved that document fundamentally away from its founders’ intentions. That is a different thing. The Labour party is content to allow it to proceed, but we are not content to let it go.