European Convention on Human Rights: 75th Anniversary

Lord Thomas of Gresford Excerpts

Thursday 20th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Thomas of Gresford (LD)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Alton, on his excellent opening to this very important debate.

When Ernest Davies, the Member of Parliament, signed the convention on behalf of the Labour Government in 1950, in Rome, he was not carving a monument in stone; he was putting his name to a dynamic and living convention. There were 15 signatories and now there are 46, excluding only Belarus and Russia in the European context.

The guide to the European court puts it this way:

“By its case-law the Court has extended the rights set out in the Convention so that its provisions apply today to situations that were totally unforeseeable and unimaginable at the time it was first adopted … new technologies, bioethics … the environment. The Convention also applies to societal or sensitive questions relating … to terrorism or migration … abortion, assisted suicide, body searches, domestic slavery, adoption by homosexuals, the wearing of religious symbols … the protection of journalists’ sources, or the retention of DNA data”.


What happens where there is no European convention?

Last week, in the United States, hundreds of Venezuelans were shipped to El Salvador. They were treated in an inhuman and degrading manner that would contravene Article 3 of the European convention. They were shackled, contravening Article 5, without any form of trial, contravening Article 6, and with no ability to complain to a court of the violation of their rights, contravening Article 13. The USA is a country which bows the knee to Magna Carta and the rule of law, but the US federal judge who sought to block this move has been ignored. “Oopsie, too late!”, said the President of El Salvador, pocketing the millions of dollars paid to his country.

Where have we seen this behaviour before? In Nazi Germany, the crimes of which motivated European countries to come together to sign the convention. There is a suggestion by the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, and others that the UK should withdraw and write its own, presumably on the Trumpian model.

There is good news. The Human Rights Act came into force in the year 2000. Since then, there have been 245 judgments against the UK, finding at least one violation of the convention. But the number of cases has steadily declined, from 18 per year at the beginning to just two in 2022. The number of applications, as the noble Lord, Lord Alton, pointed out, against the UK is now the lowest per capita of all European states. We have succeeded in bringing the convention home, as the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, pointed out, so that our own courts can and do apply its provisions in appropriate cases.

There are three reasons. First, the Human Rights Act creates a legal obligation for all public bodies, including the police, hospitals, care homes and local councils, to protect rights in all their decisions and actions, meaning that people’s rights are less likely to be breached in the first place. Secondly, United Kingdom courts are now the first port of call for any human rights claimant, and United Kingdom judges consider human rights more explicitly and intensively than they could before. Thirdly, the European court is much more likely today, in considering applications from this country, to follow the reasoning and conclusions of our courts and the decisions of our public authorities. It respects our judges and the way in which the Human Rights Act is applied. Ernest Davies, Ernie Bevin and Clement Attlee were right to feel proud of what they had done.