What's Left of our Human Rights?, Post Abu Qatada, May postures to repeal Human Rights Act Options

[Simon Kirby]

Home Secretary Theresa May said Abu Qatada's removal had taken 12 years and cost over £1.7m in legal fees, and in the wake of the Qatada hoo-ha May repeated her view that the Human Rights Act should be scrapped.

My worry here is that a state that values freedom and liberty shouldn't ever have a problem with the Human Rights Act and the European Convention that it brings into British Law, and if the state is finding the Convention difficult to live with then that really should set some warning bells clanging.

Obviously there were problems: Qatada was imprisoned without charge in the UK for most of the last 11 years, and that can't be right. The essence of the conflict would appear to be that the Convention guarantees a fair trial and does not allow torture, but that's a good thing isn't it? The Convention was drawn up after the Second World War in an attempt to prevent the kind of state brutality that fuelled the conflict and had characterized human civilization since, well, since the first man-monkeys walked out of Africa. Time was that the state could imprison you without trial, though it had become less common since Magna Carta, but the notion that torture wasn't good form was a radical idea of the mid-20th Century. Torture, and the similarly circumscribed Inhuman and Degrading Treatment, have always been popular with the British state in judicial torture, military administrative discipline, wartime terror tactics, and the suppression of civil unrest, and that kind of cultural identity is hard to change in just a few decades. Allegations of brutality by the Home Office or military are still reasonably common, and while that's perhaps the inevitable isolated outworking of psychotic tendencies in stressed individuals under extreme circumstances, sometimes it looks worrying like the routine behaviour in a culture supported by the chain of command.


Various instruments of torture, with the Iron Maiden back right (check out Virtual IX, truly appalling).

So some of the Qatada problem is that the British state hasn't wholly and irreconcilably abandoned torture - in practice mostly, but there's still that quiet private thought that maybe it's not such a bad idea.

But mostly the Qatada problem was that the state administration was rubbish. It really wasn't so very complicated: if he'd committed a crime here then try him on the evidence, and if there isn't enough evidence to try him then let him go, and if you want to extradite him to face trial in Jordan then fine, but you can't do that if he'll face torture there or not receive a fair trial. The problem then is that it took 11 years to work through the details of this - the Convention didn't change in this time, it simply took the state 11 years to figure out what to do. That's the problem here, the interminable delay in state administration.

So anywho, more generally, other than the Article 8 right to respect for private and family life that has created some unintuitive results, I find the Convention rights to be nothing more than reasonable, and I am seriously worried when the state finds those really rather minimal rights to be awkward enough to want to abandon the Convention. I might hope that Joe Public wouldn't let this happen, but that's why I worry so much - the press have done such a good hatchet job on the Convention rights than the man in the street positively reviles the Human Rights Act like it's some kind of criminals' and parasites' charter. Oh wait, lookie:

Human rights is a charter for criminals and parasites

So it's true then.

But if I just wipe away the spume for a moment, it's worth looking at the rights that we're in danger of losing.

• The right to life – protects your life, by law. The state is required to investigate suspicious deaths and deaths in custody.
• The prohibition of torture and inhuman treatment – you should never be tortured or treated in an inhuman or degrading way, no matter what the situation.
• Protection against slavery and forced labour – you should not be treated like a slave or subjected to forced labour.
• The right to liberty and freedom – you have the right to be free and the state can only imprison you with very good reason – for example, if you are convicted of a crime.
• The right to a fair trial and no punishment without law - you are innocent until proven guilty. If accused of a crime, you have the right to hear the evidence against you, in a court of law.
• Respect for privacy and family life and the right to marry – protects against unnecessary surveillance or intrusion into your life. You have the right to marry and raise a family.
• Freedom of thought, religion and belief – you can believe what you like and practise your religion or beliefs.
• Free speech and peaceful protest – you have a right to speak freely and join with others peacefully, to express your views.
• No discrimination – everyone’s rights are equal. You should not be treated unfairly – because, for example, of your gender, race, sexuality, religion or age.
• Protection of property, the right to an education and the right to free elections – protects against state interference with your possessions; means that no child can be denied an education and that elections must be free and fair.

Can you really say that for your freedom and liberty that any of those rights are excessive or burdensome on the state? Or turned the other way round, can you think of a legitimate reason why the state would want to deny you any of those rights, or why any of those rights would conflict with a legitimate act of the state?