Protecting human rights in the UK
A few more things have been bothering me about Chris Grayling MP’s anti-human rights plan, the Orwellian titled “Protecting human rights in the UK”:
In order to discredit the European Convention on Human Rights without also discrediting his own party who led the treaty’s creation in 1950, Grayling argues that times have changed such that we no longer need it. The audacity of this statement is staggering. It’s like saying we no longer need a military budget because there hasn’t been a proper war for a long while.
Grayling goes on praise the rights enshrined in the ECHR, but criticizes the EU’s power to actually enforce those rights. Even though the UK has agreed to these terms for decades, he is apparently so upset over relatively minor rulings like prisoners’ right to vote to threaten pulling the UK out of the EU altogether.
Note: It’s doubtful that he’s actually this petty: a more rational reason is that GCHQ was afraid the EU would rule their domestic surveillance system to be massively illegal. As Secretary for Justice, one of only two people authorised to sign RIPA intercept warrants, Grayling would have been aware of this; even if GCHQ concealed the nature of classified systems from him, he would have been made aware of them after the Snowden disclosures. By the time he published “Protecting human rights in the UK”, Grayling was aware of the threat and began pushing ECHR immunity, ECHR withdrawal or EU withdrawal, all solutions which would preserve GCHQ’s surveillance capabilities.
He confidently states that the ECHR does not specifically guarantee voting rights to prisoners because the authors intentionally left it out. But if the authors were aware of the issue and intended to exclude prisoners from the right to vote, they could easily have added such an exclusion to the treaty.
Grayling cites Germany as a country who declare the ECHR cannot overrule their national law, giving Britain precedent can do the same. He fails to deduce what follows, that other countries could use Britain as precedent to do the same, leaving the ECHR powerless to force change in countries whose governments abuse human rights; precisely the reason it exists.