Rights inside

This evening the UK House of Commons is debating prisoners’ voting rights. The position used to be that while you were in prison you couldn’t vote. Simple.

Then a prisoner took the Government to the European Court of Human Rights, saying his rights were breached in removing his vote.

The House is likely to vote that only those prisoners in for a short stay and for certain minor offences will be allowed the vote, and the UK will probably have to pay a fine for not doing as it is told.

I can’t get terribly excited about the main issue: prison as a punishment is there to deter the guilty from doing it again and to deter others from committing the crime. I simply cannot imagine someone out to commit, say, an armed robbery being stopped by a friend saying ‘Watch out: if you’re caught you won’t be able to vote in the forthcoming elections.’ Most people don’t bother to vote anyway and most prisoners won’t bother. Another purpose of prison is to rehabilitate prisoners – not that we are very good at that, and what could be a better way of making them feel part of society than letting them choose who their leaders are?

Let them vote, they’re probably no less capable of understanding the issues than other people.

And the debate misses the important point: Britain and its people had no say in this. We are having to obey a law imposed by unelected judges from other countries. This is the first contentious edict from the human rights act I can remember even going before Parliament and even now the Government doesn’t promise to follow Parliament’s decision. What we need to do, all of us, is to subscribe to the principles of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights but have laws in Britain approved by the British Parliament, and those in Germany approved by the German one.

But they’re not even discussing that.

The captive electorate

David Cameron is said to be 'furious' that the Government is being forced to allow prisoners the right to vote.

Wet, wet, wet. He's Prime Minister, for God's sake. If he feels strongly he should do something, and the obvious move is to amend the relevant legislation, the Human Rights Act, withdrawing from this wishy washy world where judges can declare almost anything to be a human right. Chuck the whole damn European Socialist-inspired Declaration of Human Rights in the bin and replace it with British legislation for the British people.

Cameron's excuse for not promising to get rid of the HRA was that it would send the wrong signal to the world. Believe me, Dave, your average African dictator couldn't care less about what goes on in Britain, as long as he can imprison his opponents. And what signal has this daft wish list sent to China? They must be laughing their heads off while they imprison the bloggers and dissidents.

This follows Cameron's craven climbdown on the European budget. At the next election the voters might decide that they would prefer someone with balls.

In the meantime we can reflect on how the candidates are going to try to attract the votes of this new constituency.

A shameful piece of nonsense

I think the first thing which needs to be said about the strange case of Abid Naseer and Ahmad Faraz Khan is that they arrived in the UK on legitimate visas and have not been convicted of any crime. In fact they have not even been charged.

However the Home Office wanted them deported, convinced they were al-Qaeda operatives and a danger to national security. A judge has now said that they cannot be deported because they might face torture.

A number of lessons need to be drawn from this. The first is, that having been told for years that our Foreign Office is a Rolls Royce machine, we are slowly coming to the certainty that it is comprised of a bunch of lazy, ineffective pen-pushers. Pakistan is supposed to be an ally of the UK in the war on terrorism, and we couldn’t even get some assurance that they wouldn’t torture their own people for something done here? We’re on the same side for God’s sake!

Incidentally, I don’t think the British Public are in tune with the politically right-on about torture. I think an opinion poll would reveal that the vast majority wouldn’t care if these people were tortured by their own government. It goes on in China all the time and we never complain about that.

The second lesson is that whatever we do in this coalition period it is clear that a priority must be getting rid of the absurd human rights legislation. Foreign lawmaking judges can hand down interpretations to British Courts to the effect that legislation, even the control over our borders, is now out of our hands.

So what will happen to this strange pair who are seeking asylum in a country where they apparently intended to commit mass murder? The Home Secretary, Teresa May, who has not had a good start, has suggested that they will be subject to control orders. I am against these. I think the guilty should be sent to prison and the not-guilty left alone. Control orders are a way of imprisoning the innocent.

But we’ll have to keep an eye on Messrs. Naseer and Khan. To mount 24hr surveillance requires 50 operatives.

Could someone in authority please take a step backwards and tell us whether this state of affairs is (a) roughly what they envisaged, (b) sustainable and (c) a suitable example of governance for the future. The new Lord Chancellor, who has also had a poor start, has said that reviewing the human rights legislation is not a priority. I think it is. This is clearly a piece of idiotic nonsense.

As someone said during the election campaign, we can’t go on like this.

UN: Human Rights are 60!

Today is the 60th anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. Britain played its part in drawing this up, as it did with the European Declaration on Human Rights which was drawn from it; and the British Human Rights Act is taken from that.

But I must say I sometimes wonder what we have got. The Declaration contains a number of worthy aims: Article 5 says ‘No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment’; here is Article 19: 'Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression’

But it seems to me we have seen this time and again: making a worthy expression of what is good makes us feel better but doesn’t get us any further on. Since December 1948 we know that it is only the bad guys who torture; has torture stopped? Now we know that only evil countries prevent freedom of expression. Imagine! And this has lead to other unworldly wordiness, as with Tony Blair’s ‘handguns’ law, the result being that only the bad guys have guns; or the landmines declaration so beloved of the late Princess of Wales which results in the British Army not being allowed landmines but the people they are fighting having them anyway.

Some say that the value of the UDHR is to lay down a fundamental law so that even though they didn’t actually sign it, the likes of Radko Mladic are subject to it. But what is the use of that? Did we prosecute China for breach of Article 15 ‘Everyone has the right to a nationality’ or Article 21 ‘Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives’. And how many articles is Mugabe in breach of?

It simply hasn’t been convenient to enforce the UNDHR in many places so we simply haven’t, which means that every tin pot dictator knows it is worthless. I think that it would be better if instead of making cosy social democratic love talk we shut up, unless we were prepared to invade anyone in breach of our list of rights, and we’re not, and simply set an example in our own country for the rest of the world to follow.