Downing Street will present sweeping plans tomorrow to overturn the power of Europe’s human rights court just days after a Strasbourg judge blocked the deportation of asylum seekers from Britain to Rwanda.
The abolition of the Human Rights Act (HRA), including reducing the influence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), will be brought before parliament in what the government described as a reaffirmation of British sovereignty.
But activists and prominent lawyers denounced the landmark move, saying the government was systematically undermining people’s rights in a bid to make itself “untouchable” by the courts.
They fear that the new British bill of rights will not have the same protections.
Sacha Deshmukh, executive director of Amnesty International UK, said: “The [Strasbourg] The court’s intervention in the Rwandan deportation last week was an example of its critical role in ensuring that basic human rights are not violated, declaring nothing more than that the UK should stop deportations to Rwanda pending the outcome of our own national judicial review process.
“It is deeply worrying that the UK government is willing to undermine respect for the authority of the European Court of Human Rights for a single decision it does not like.
“It’s not about playing with rights, it’s about taking them away.
“From the Hillsborough disaster, to the right to a proper Covid investigation, to the right to question the way police investigate endemic violence against women, the Human Rights Law is the cornerstone of people power in this country. It is no coincidence that the very politicians he is holding to account want to see him fatally weakened.”
A senior government source admitted that last week’s Rwanda ruling, which humiliated ministers, had been a factor.
“Some of the problems or challenges that we’ve had (regarding Rwanda) have reinforced and strengthened the case for what we’re doing,” the source said.
The government said the bill would make explicit that ECHR interim measures, such as the one issued last week that stopped the deportation flight to Rwanda, are not binding on UK courts.
The source said that “sovereignty has been fragmented and questioned for many years by a combination of the EU and other supranational bodies, including the Strasbourg court.”
However, UK courts are not bound by ECHR decisions and critics say other changes will have more significant negative impacts.
Stephanie Boyce, president of the Law Society of England and Wales, said: “The erosion of accountability touted by the justice secretary indicates a deepening of the government’s disregard for the checks and balances that underpin the rule of law.
“The bill will create an acceptable class of human rights abuses in the UK, by introducing [under a new permission stage] a ban on claims deemed not to cause a “significant disadvantage”.
“It is a setback for British justice. Some violations of rights may begin to be considered acceptable by the authorities, because they can no longer be challenged under the bill of rights despite being contrary to law.
“Overall, the bill would give the state greater unlimited power over the people, power that would then belong to all future governments, regardless of their ideologies.”
Jun Pang, policy and campaign officer at Liberty, said: “Over and over again, the government has been trying to change the rules to become untouchable, and the Rwanda scheme is a very good example of that.
“This is the most recent example, but there are countless examples of how the government clamps down on people’s rights, be it on the streets, in the courts, at the polls or in parliament.
“The bill of rights will result in the erosion of rights for all and the reduction of protections for all, but obviously with the most disproportionate effects on already marginalized communities.”
The government said the bill will ensure that courts consider relevant conduct by a plaintiff, such as a prisoner’s violent or criminal behavior, when awarding damages, and will make it easier to deport criminal aliens by enabling future immigration laws that would force them to show that a child or dependent would suffer overwhelming and unavoidable harm if removed from the country.
He also said he would boost press freedom by elevating the right to free speech above the right to privacy, which has restricted information in recent years, and introducing a stronger test for courts to consider before ordering journalists to reveal their sources.
The UK will remain a signatory to the European convention on human rights, which the HRA has incorporated into national law, but the government said the law had led the courts to “cut back, reinterpret or water down the effects of the primary legislation”.
Justice Secretary Dominic Raab said: “The bill of rights will strengthen our tradition of freedom in the UK while injecting a healthy dose of common sense into the system.
“These reforms will strengthen free speech, allow us to deport more criminal aliens and better protect the public from dangerous criminals.”
Professor Philippe Sands QC, who was part of the 2013 commission on a bill of rights, said: “Mr Raab takes a nationalist and xenophobic spin on the idea of human rights, eviscerating one of its most fundamental principles: human rights. Basic human rights exist for all, and must be demanded at the request of all. The government wants to turn back the clock to an era before 1945, a time when, as the writer Joseph Roth put it, ‘the graves of world history are opening wide…and all the corpses that are I thought they were buried they are coming out’”.
Reference-www.theguardian.com