European Convention on Human Rights

Lord Tomlinson Excerpts

Thursday 19th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tomlinson]

My Lords, I have the privilege to be one of the representatives of your Lordships’ House in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. I immediately opted to serve on the political committee in that Council but quickly asked if I could additionally serve on the legal affairs committee, which had an agenda that I considered far too important to be left as the exclusive preserve of lawyers, so I serve on both those committees.

There has been an absolutely exponential growth in the workload of the European Court of Human Rights. If we take the years from its formation through to 1998, the total number of applications to the court was 45,000. If we look at last year, the total applications were 61,300—a 50 per cent increase in that single year on the total for the first 41 years of its actions. That is one reason why the court desperately needs reform. Its delays are very long. At the beginning of 2001, there were approximately 139,650 applications pending before a judicial formation, more than half of which were from four individual countries: Russia, Turkey, Romania and Ukraine. Yet by the time those long-delayed cases are heard, 97 per cent of them are judged to be inadmissible. That is causing an astronomical blockage in the court’s work and needs to be addressed.

The noble Lords, Lord Prescott and Lord Pannick, and a number of others referred to the need for reform. Sorting out earlier judgments on admissibility is a priority in that reform. Stopping some practices that have emerged after the prisoner voting case is another problem. As noble Lords will know, applications to the European Court of Human Rights are made individually, but since the view on prisoner voting several firms of solicitors have been touting themselves around prisons, signing up prisoners on a no-win no-fee basis and submitting thousands of individual applications. That is also clogging up the system, so that sort of legal abuse needs to be sorted out.

However, the most important reform needed is to the financing of the court. No one so far, I think, has referred to this. The Council of Ministers of the European Union gets all its resources for making decisions from the same treasury that coughs up the money for the contribution to the European Court of Human Rights and the work of giving effect to the European convention. In the last decade those people, who get their money from exactly the same source, found no difficulty when the outcome of the Convention on the Future of Europe was running into difficulty at a European Heads of State Meeting in finding a bribe for the Austrian Government. They could not get unanimity at a European Council meeting and, in order to encourage unanimity, they created the fundamental rights agency in Vienna. That fundamental rights agency was unnecessary. It largely replicated the work that was being done by the European Court of Human Rights, but the same Ministers who pleaded privation when it came to properly funding the European Court of Human Rights threw money at Austria, and we contributed to the European budget as if money was no object. They could in effect get plenty of money for one useless purpose: undermining the useful purpose of the European Court of Human Rights.

I am not asking the Minister to solve the problem. That would be asking too much even of the noble Lord, Lord McNally. However, I ask him to tell us whether it will be a fundamental part of the British presidency of the Committee of Ministers to finance those two organisations relatively sensibly. My view of relative sense is to take it from the fundamental rights agency and give it to the European court. I do not expect him to agree with me, but I give him a possible solution. We have a European Court of Human Rights starved of resources, but the same Ministers of the 27 EU countries have no difficulty finding them for other purposes.

When we come to judgments of the European Court of Human Rights, we have to accept that they cannot be regarded as some kind of à la carte menu from which we pick and choose judgments that we like. We are obligated, particularly if we expect all those newly emerging democracies that are encompassed within the framework of the European Convention on Human Rights to observe the rule of law in the same way as everyone else. We cannot pick and choose the judgements that we observe.

I very strongly subscribe to the view of the European Human Rights Commissioner, Commissioner Thomas Hammarberg. I read one small sentence of his views:

“Prisoners, though deprived of physical liberty, have human rights. Measures should be taken to ensure that imprisonment does not undermine rights which are unconnected to the intention of the punishment”.

He goes on to elaborate on that. That is fundamentally important.

This has been an excellent debate, and I am truly grateful to my noble and learned friend Lord Irvine of Lairg for initiating it. I hope, because of the importance and utility of this debate, that the Minister, when he winds up, will perhaps tell us that, after the six-month presidency of the Committee of Ministers, when we have an agenda for reform, he might well produce a report and score sheet on our activities during that period, and then arrange for a similar debate early in 2011.