Tag Archives: European Convention on HUman Rights

Positioning for the next election

Posted on by

Today, the Unit published Monitor 85, providing analysis of constitutional events over the last four months. It covers a continuing crisis of parliamentary scrutiny and political standards, a string of avoidable by-elections, the continuing stalemate in Northern Ireland, SNP travails in Scotland, electoral reform in Wales, and a failed referendum campaign in Australia. This post, which also serves as this issue’s lead article, outlines how the government and its opponents are starting to draw the battle lines for the next general election against a background of constitutional change and challenges throughout the United Kingdom.

Rishi Sunak marked his first anniversary as Prime Minister on 25 October. The legacy of his predecessors continued to dog him over the summer. Boris Johnson’s resignation from parliament in June – covered in the last issue of Monitor – triggered a by-election in his constituency of Uxbridge and South Ruislip. The Conservative Party hung on there, but lost four other by-elections in safe seats, three of which were called due to reasons related to Johnson’s departure. Meanwhile, the Covid-19 inquiry revealed what many saw as chaos at the heart of government.

Sunak sought to reset his image in September, as a Prime Minister focused on making the right long-term decisions. He acknowledged that ‘people in our country are frustrated with our politics’, saying, ‘I know that they dislike Westminster game playing, the short termism, and the lack of accountability.’ He pledged ‘a wholly new kind of politics’ with ‘space for a better, more honest debate about how we secure the country’s long-term interest.’ Announcing a shift in net zero policy, he added, ‘in a democracy, we must also be able to scrutinise and debate those changes’.

These were virtuous sentiments, chiming strongly with much of what defenders of core democratic and constitutional principles have been pressing for in recent years. But aspects of the speech appeared to undermine them. Some dropped policies had never actually existed. Sunak’s call for accountability and scrutiny was delivered on the first day of a parliamentary recess, leaving MPs unable to question him on his plans for almost a month. The Commons Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, responded with a sharply worded rebuke.

Continue reading →

The UK’s defiance of the European Court of Human Rights

Posted on by

Veronika Fikfak argues that by amending the Illegal Migration Bill to require UK courts to ignore a potential interim measure from the European Court of Human Rights, the UK government has reached for the most drastic option, exposing its carefully fostered image of a ‘good complier’ as merely a myth. She warns against passage of the amendment, and criticises the government for taking the same path as Russia by choosing defiance over dialogue.

In late April, the government tabled a number of amendments to the Illegal Migration Bill, including an order to domestic courts to ignore a potential interim measure from the European Court of Human Rights (‘the ECtHR’) to stop someone being removed from the UK if they bring forward a legal challenge. British judges have been told that if the bill is enacted with the new amendments, it will mean that they ‘cannot apply any interim measure, aside from in the narrow route available under the bill where [the applicants] are at risk of serious and irreversible harm.’ The House of Lords Constitution Committee has raised serious concerns about the potential impact of the bill on the rule of law and human rights. In this blog, I argue that this order puts the UK on par with Russia and Poland, which have used domestic law to prevent compliance with their international obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). I show how both countries have sought out a direct conflict with the Strasbourg Court and how the UK – for the first time since joining the ECHR – is taking the same route. I also outline how far its behaviour goes from the usual ‘good complier’ image that the UK has carefully fostered.

Poland and Russia choose defiance over compliance

In international law, courts are notoriously dependent on states, and especially their executive branches, to enforce their judgments. Since the international community has no enforcement mechanism to compel states to comply with a decision of an international court, if a state were to refuse to do so voluntarily, the judgment would remain merely words on paper. Yet generally states have been reluctant to openly defy the ECtHR by refusing to enforce its judgments. Instead, negotiations, lobbying and delays are the standard techniques to avoid or minimise compliance. Even when countries adopt domestic laws that clearly contradict the ECHR (such as in the case of immigration legislation in Denmark or the UK’s recent bill), this is usually done under the cover that the state ‘seeks to clarify the content of obligations under the Convention’ or more boldly that it wishes to ‘test the limits’ of the ECHR. Once a judgment is delivered, the state promptly puts in place a process to comply with the judgment (such as in the case of Savran v Denmark). The intent to voluntarily comply with the ECHR is present for the majority of countries.

Continue reading →

Northern Ireland: how can power-sharing be revived?

Posted on by

Alan Whysall was a panellist in the session on Northern Ireland at the Unit’s State of the Constitution conference on 23 June. This revision of his talk draws on his paper for the Unit on Northern Ireland’s Political Future, and its accompanying blogpost. He argues that stable power-sharing can only return through good faith inclusive negotiation – which is not a part of London’s current approach – and a reinforcement of the foundations of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement.

It is essential to bring all the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement institutions back as soon as possible: that unlocks the potential for political progress. Without the institutions, polarisation grows; the longer they are away, the harder ultimately the Agreement settlement is to sustain. And there is no alternative as a framework for the stable government of Northern Ireland.

Devolution still has wide popular support and the political class has a strong self-interest in restoring the institutions, if only because paying them not to undertake government is becoming unpopular. But there are big questions about how.

The government’s approach

Can the institutions be stably restored the government’s way? Setting aside for now judgements about the government’s approach, its integrity, or the extraordinary contents (breach of international obligations, vast delegation of powers to ministers) of the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, this seems to me to be doubtful.

Continue reading →

Constitutional reform: then and now (1995-2020)

Posted on by

In the latest blog celebrating the Constitution Unit’s 25th anniversary, human rights academic and advocate Francesca Klug recounts how aspects of the constitutional agenda of the mid-1990s were realised, and what lessons we can learn about how to entrench its achievements, prevent democratic backsliding and stop erosion of hard-won rights.

When I was at school, I learned nothing about the British constitution, but one thing I did absorb was this: although we do not have a written founding document, our invisible constitution was apparently uniquely successful and therefore inviolable. However, during the 1980s, I gradually became aware that there was something a bit odd about this perfect constitution. In other democracies, many of the controversial or unpopular measures introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s governments – such as the ‘poll tax’ and broadcasting and book bans – could be challenged in the courts. In the UK, however, there was nothing citizens could do to overturn such policies, except take to the streets to protest or wait up to five years for another election. 

This powerlessness and lack of accountability was a major driver behind the founding of Charter 88 in 1988, led by Anthony Barnett and Stewart Weir. I was lucky as a relatively young activist to be asked to join its council. We called for holistic change: a democratic second chamber, electoral reform, devolution, freedom of information and a bill of rights. And we had one major overall objective: we wanted the people of this country to have more power over the decisions which affected them; what in today’s money might be called ‘taking back control’. We sought this not for its own sake, but as a means of making our society fairer. 

It took a little time, but this message started to persuade people at the highest levels of the Labour Party. John Smith succeeded Neil Kinnock as Leader following the Conservatives’ 1992 general election victory and the following year he gave a landmark speech to Charter 88, entitled ‘A Citizens’ Democracy’. For the first time, he articulated a clear objective for wholesale constitutional reform. Its purpose, he said, was to ‘restore democracy to our people – for what we have in this country is not real democracy: it is elective dictatorship.’ The use of the term ‘elective dictatorship’ is interesting, as it partly echoed Lord Hailsham, a former Conservative Lord Chancellor, who had coined the phrase two decades earlier. Notably, in this speech Smith committed the Labour Party to the introduction of a human rights act based on the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR), which turned 70 years old this month. 

John Smith died unexpectedly the following year, but Tony Blair, despite some scepticism, largely kept faith with his predecessor’s commitment to constitutional reform. The precise objectives articulated by Smith, however, seemed to wither away and the purpose of the proposed policies became more obscure. In particular, there was no unified narrative to link them together and no sense of what might come next. 

Continue reading →