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

Supermax prisons: America's own gulag

The European Court of Human Right’s extraordinary decision that a lifetime of solitary confinement in a “supermax” prison in the United States would not amount to a violation of human rights flies in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

In sanctioning the extradition of Abu Hamza, Babar Ahmad and three others on terrorism charges, the ECHR is condoning the most brutal form of confinement that some say is worse than being held at Guantanamo.

ADX Florence, a federal jail in Colorado, where the alleged suspects are heading for unless they win an appeal, is a so-called “supermax” prison where inmates are held under conditions that the New York lawyers association clearly views as inhuman. In a report last year, its committee on international human rights said:

These prisoners endure conditions of extreme sensory deprivation for months or years on end, an excruciating experience in which the prisoner remains isolated from any meaningful human contact. Access to a telephone, books, magazines, radio, television, even sunlight and outside air may be denied or severely restricted.

The policy of supermax confinement, on the scale which it is currently being implemented in the United States, violates basic human rights. We believe that in many cases supermax confinement constitutes torture under international law according to international jurisprudence and cruel and unusual punishment under the US Constitution.

The organisation Solitary Watch says that based on available data, there are at least 80,000 prisoners in isolated confinement on any given day in America’s prisons and jails, including some 25,000 in long-term solitary in supermax prisons.

Outside of supermax prisons, there is evidence of thousands of inmates with mental illness being held in solitary confinement and in one shocking case, shackled to the bed. Many are in prison simply because of cuts to mental health services and receive no treatment once behind bars.

A CBS report in 2009 described ADX Florence as a “21st century Alcatraz”, while a former warden told the programme that it was “a clean version of hell”.

The majority of ADX Florence is underground. Each cell has a desk, a stool, and a bed, which are almost entirely made out of poured concrete. Rooms may also be fitted with polished steel mirrors bolted to the wall, an electric light, a radio, and a black and white television which is remotely controlled and showing designated programmes.

The windows are designed to prevent inmates from knowing their specific location within the complex. Inmates exercise in a concrete pit resembling an empty swimming pool, also designed to prevent them from knowing their location in the facility. Communication with the outside world is forbidden, and food is hand-delivered by prison officers.

The New York bar association’s report finds that supermax confinement “is largely immunized from judicial review” and that what takes place in the institutions is regarded as “permissible treatment” under current case law. In other words, this is an extra-judicial process such as is used by dictatorships around the world.

While the ECHR judges found that if convicted, the holding of the suspects in supermax conditions would be acceptable, it is left to New York’s lawyers to uphold the rule of law and human rights:

The unmitigated suffering caused by supermax confinement, however, cannot be justified by the argument that it is an effective means to deal with difficult prisoners or is effective at controlling and punishing unruly inmates. Instead, the question is whether the vast archipelago of American supermax facilities, in which some prisoners are kept isolated indefinitely for years, should be tolerated as consistent with fundamental principles of justice. Even prisoners who have committed horrific crimes and atrocities possess basic rights to humane treatment under national and international law.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor