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I heard just a little bit of Dominic’s talk outside and, actually I’d rather like to
cede my time to him because I cannot understand what he was talking about. It is a really
important point this: I cannot see how one can fiddle around using British statutes with
the interpretation of the Act and still keep that interpretation compatible with the convention.
I fear that what is going to happen is either that we end up with some symbolic Acts of
Parliament that satisfy the political forces that Dominic’s party feel that they have
to satisfy but nothing else happens - purely symbol and no effect. Or, we will find ourselves
as a county in danger of being in breach of the convention and quite frankly I do not
want to be in either of those positions. I think it would be much better simply to accept
that the Human Rights Act is here to stay, that it would be inherently a bad thing to
mess about with it and that if people want to talk more about other rights they should
start to distinguish very clearly between human rights and supplementary rights that
are or could be owed to British citizens by the British Government, and that is the simple
point that I want to put across.
I think the time has come to resist the pressure that mainly comes from the media to undermine
the Human Rights Act. I can quite see why parts of the media want to do that, that they
blame the Human Rights Act and the judiciary interpretation of the Human Rights Act for
the development of privacy law, and that they have a commercial interest in breaching people’s
privacy, and I can see why that pressure is coming but it should be resisted.
The time has come to say the Human Rights Act is here to stay, human rights are basic,
they are the rights that every state owes to every human, and we should leave that alone.
We can argue about scope of enforcement, we can argue about practicalities of enforcement,
we can certainly argue about things like what counts as an examination of state but I do
not think we should argue with any of the substantive rights at all and we should not
be trying to pass statutes to interfere with the courts’ interpretation of those rights.
But what we can do is engage in a conversation about what extra rights at some point we might
to incorporate into a written constitution for this country, that is a very slow process.
It means talking about entrenchment seriously, means talking about the powers of the courts
seriously; it means thinking about whether to add to basic human rights, some 'citizenship
rights' for British citizens, that would include for example discussion about the entrenchment
of the right to jury trial. But those things are entirely separate from a conversation
about human rights and my only message today is this, it is time for the people in politics
in this country where the idea of human rights was first developed to end their hostility
to the basic notion that there are limits on what any state can do to any person. That
means accept the Human Rights Act for what it is and stop moaning!
Thank you.