Cameron’s pledge to scrap the Human Rights Act shows he’s legally illiterate

In a crowded field, there is one issue which can always evoke splenetic outrage in the Daily Mail and the Tory backbenches: the Human Rights Act. And so it came as no surprise that its abolition ‘once and for all’ formed an integral part of David Cameron’s speech to the Tory conference. He had a simple pitch: the UK government is being told what to do, not by its own Courts but by Strasbourg. So we need a British Bill of Rights enforced by British judges in British Courts.

Naturally, he left the details of that Bill of Rights vague. We are not told what rights it would seek to protect or how, if at all, they would differ from those which we already enjoy under the European Convention of Human Rights. I would certainly defy anyone in the Tory party to tell me which of those existing rights – to, for instance, life, freedom of expression, protection from torture or arbitrary detention – they object to, or which they would abolish. The Convention is a creation of the Council of Europe (and nothing to do with the EU) which was itself formed shortly after, and in direct response to, the horrors of the Second World War. Among its most enthusiastic proponents was Winston Churchill.

Perhaps because of its history, or perhaps because not even Mr. Cameron could disavow the fundamental rights which it protects, there was no suggestion in his speech that the UK would no longer be a signatory to the ECHR. And therein lies the legal illiteracy of his pledge to repeal the Human Rights Act. As long as we remain signatories, citizens of the UK will retain the right to go to Strasbourg and the UK, under international law, will be obliged to comply with its rulings.

The very purpose of the Human Rights Act was to give jurisdiction to UK courts, and judges, to determine issues of human rights; previously they had been determined solely in Strasbourg.  So if you scrap the Act, you immediately hand that power back to Strasbourg and away from this country. Which, of course, was exactly what Mr. Cameron said he wanted to avoid.

Until this summer, Mr. Cameron had the benefit of an extremely able, but independently minded, Attorney General, Dominic Grieve. I find it hard to believe that he did not deliver this simple, but inconvenient, legal truth to the Prime Minister. He appears to have paid for that advice with his job. That he did so tells us much about this government.