Human Rights and that Act

I see constantly in the newspapers reports and articles condemning the Human Rights Act and blaming it for many ills, both real and imagined, and calling for its repeal, on the basis that it is something enforced upon us by Europe and the EC when nothing could be further from the truth!
The Human Rights Act merely gives UK courts the power to determine issues arising from the European Convention on Human Rights, and it is to this we must look.

In 1941 US President Franklin D. Roosevelt articulated the four freedoms that people "everywhere in the world" ought to enjoy: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear.
Nothing anti-British there!

In 1946, in a speech at the University of Zurich, Sir Winston Churchill called for a United States of Europe and the creation of a Council of Europe and in 1948 in Paris the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which arose directly from the experience of the Second World War and represented a global expression of the rights to which all human beings are inherently entitled.

So far so good?

The Council of Europe itself, as advocated by Churchill, was founded on 5 May 1949 by the Treaty of London which was signed on that day by ten states: Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

At the Hague Congress in 1949 of the Council of Europe, representatives from all walks of life called for a convention on human rights following the atrocities of the Second World War and the British MP and lawyer Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, the Chair of the Assembly's Committee on Legal and Administrative Questions, guided the drafting of the Convention. He had been a prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials and had seen at first hand how international justice could be effectively applied.

The Convention was drafted in broad terms, in a similar manner to the English Bill of Rights, the American Bill of Rights, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and was designed to incorporate a traditional civil liberties approach to securing "effective political democracy" from the strongest traditions in the United Kingdom, France and other member states of the fledgling Council of Europe.

Thus it can be seen that there is nothing about the Convention that is contrary to British values, indeed it is those same British values which underpin the entire Convention and Britain was a major player in its creation.

Far from the Convention being somehow un-British, fostered upon us by Europe, it would be more accurate to say that it was Britain who applied to Europe our standards of behaviour. Indeed, it was always the justification given for the UK, prior to the Human Rights Act, not ratifying the Convention into English Law - for that was how we did things anyway and didn’t need a Convention to tell us how to behave.