Tories have Human Rights Act in their sights

The imminent appearance of the parliamentary commission’s report into a new Bill of Rights is giving the Tory right an opportunity to bray against what they call “a court sitting overseas” – the European Court of Human Rights.

For the Bill of Rights as is proposed is not about holding parliamentary lawmakers and the executive to account or guaranteeing basic democratic rights. No, quite the opposite. Behind the nationalist demagogy about “diktats from Brussels” and a purely “British” form of justice, is something quite different.

This is prime minister Cameron’s effort to appease the right wing in his Conservative party.  Their nationalism provides a cover for a visceral hatred for the idea of human rights in general and the European Court of Human Rights in particular.

Strangely enough, for the Union Jack-waving backwoods people who argue that the ECHR is a dictatorial “imposition” from Europe, it was the Tory Winston Churchill who helped establish the European Convention of Human Rights. The same Convention then led to the establishment of the European Court of Human Rights in 1959, as human rights lawyer Bill Bowring notes.

Despite this, it took four decades for the convention to be – and then only partially – incorporated into British law. This took place in 1998 under New Labour. But, to the anger of human rights lawyers, home secretary David Blunkett immediately “derogated” – i.e. opted out – of Article 5 of the Convention, which enshrines “the right to liberty and security of person”.

He did this as on the grounds that there was a terrorist threat and a public emergency in the UK following the 9/11 attacks on New York, which overrode any such individual rights.  New Labour’s derogation dovetailed neatly with the needs of the secret state – namely the heads of the military, the police and secret services – and last but certainly not least – the US Central Intelligence Agency’s own “war on terror”.

Two recent cases show why human rights legislation is hated by the right.  Asperger’s Syndrome sufferer Gary McKinnon avoided extradition to the United States on computer hacking charges under the Human Rights Act.  It took huge determination by McKinnon himself, his mother and lawyers to conduct  a ten-year legal campaign after initially losing appeals in the High Court and the House of Lords against his extradition. Last week, it was decided he would face no charges in Britain.

The case of German citizen Khaled el-Masri has taken almost as long.  El-Masri was seized by security officers in Macedonia on 31 December 2003 while crossing into Serbia. He held incommunicado for 23 days, turned over to the CIA and tortured.  It was only on December 13 last week that 17 European court judges provided him with any kind of redress.

The ECHR has held that his forcible disappearance, kidnapping and “rendition” in Skopje to the United States violated the most basic guarantees of human decency. He had never been charged with any crime. It was a case of mistaken identity but neither the CIA nor the US government admitted what happened.

The Commission for the Bill of Rights has already cited the “exponential increase” in the ECHR’s caseload as a threat to its viability. At that time the court had a backlog of 150,000 cases. The commission’s first proposal is that new screening mechanisms should be introduced to “reduce very significantly the number of cases that reach the Court”.

So the ECHR is facing a twin attack – from the Tories in Britain and from the backlog of cases as a result of the mounting attacks on human rights. The Bill of Rights under consideration is a Trojan horse which we should not make the mistake of accepting as a gift. Instead, we should fight for an Agreement of the People, a democratic constitution for the 21^st century.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Unequal Britain

Shocking differences within society are revealed in the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s first ever report into fairness in Britain. And the future looks serious, with the report warning that “the current economic and social crises threaten to widen some equality gaps”.

How Fair is Britain? concludes that while “Britain is a more diverse society than it was a generation ago”, groups such as gypsies and migrants still experience serious prejudice and hostility, not to mention inequality.

Overall, life expectancy has nearly doubled, on average, since 1900. But within this overall improvement, just as on many other measures of quality of life, there are vast differences, depending above all on social class, as well as ethnic origin, gender and location:

*One in five people live in a household with less than 60% of average income
*The wealthiest men and women can expect to live up to seven years longer than the poorest. *Black African women who are asylum seekers are thought to die seven times earlier than White women
* On average women earned 16% less than men, widening to 27% for women aged 40
* Life expectancy in Scotland is around three years lower than in England. More people die early in Scotland than in other Western European country
* Black Caribbean and Pakistani babies are twice as likely to die in their first year than Bangladeshi or White British babies
* Nearly three-quarters of Bangladeshi children and half of Black African children in Britain grow up in poverty
* A quarter of women in their 50s are carers
* Black people and infants under one year are more likely than others to be victims of homicide
* Ethnic minorities were victims of around a quarter of homicides recorded in England and Wales between 2007-10
* One in four adults in Wales lack basic literacy skills, in contrast to one in six in England.

Attacks on vulnerable people and minorities particularly affect children and young people. Two-thirds of lesbian, gay and transgender school children have experienced serious bullying and even death threats. Equally ugly is the finding that over a quarter of all reported rapes have been against children under 16, boys in particular.

There are some positive developments for those who believe in tolerance and diversity. Almost one out of every 10 British children now grows up in a mixed race household. Gaps in performance by some ethnic minority children have decreased.

And attitudes to homosexuality at the level of civil partnership rights, for example, have improved. But for virtually each of these improvements, serious problems of inequality and discrimination persist as deep scars in society.

For some, there are still, “gateways to opportunity which appear permanently closed, no matter how hard they try; while others seem to have been issued with an ‘access all areas’ pass at birth,” EHRC chair Trevor Phillips notes.

There are many cultural differences as well as accidents of birth which affect the life chances of an individual in our society. But the bottom line and the common denominator for all the inequalities identified in this report is wealth – in other words, economic class.

The poorest 10 per cent of people possess average wealth one hundredth the average wealth of the richest 10%. Put another way, the total net household wealth of the top 10% is £853,000 – almost 100 times higher than the net wealth of the poorest 10%, which is £8,800 or below.

In a society where the gap between the rich and the poor has widened enormously, there can be no surprise that fear, hatred and discrimination persist. A transfer of economic and political power to the majority in society is the urgent precondition for solving inequality.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary