The Guardian’s lead story on Thursday was that of Lord Lester, an adviser to Gordon Brown, quitting over the government’s human rights record.
His particular anger, the paper reports, was with Jack Straw (the justice secretary), who referred to the Human Rights Act of 1998 being perceived as a “villains’ charter”, in an interview with the Daily Mail.
The full story of Lester’s resignation can be read here; however, I thought I would do a little background research, in order to delineate some of what is talked about in the article.
The Human Rights Act, passed by Labour in 1998, describes itself as “An Act to give further effect to rights and freedoms guaranteed under the European Convention on Human Rights; to make provision with respect to holders of certain judicial offices who become judges of the European Court of Human Rights; and for connected purposes.” (http://tinyurl.com/6n8hoy).
The real ‘meat and drink’ of the Act was that it strictly aligned UK law with the European Convention on Human Rights, and totally abolished the death penalty (at the time, one could still be executed for some military crimes).
Reading Straw’s interview in the Mail, his opinion appears to be less critical of the Act than of its interpretation by the courts: “Some judges have been ‘too nervous’ about deporting terrorist suspects, he says, when there was no reason to believe they were at risk of death or torture - which would preclude their deportation under the act.”
Indeed, Straw is quoted as calling the Act an ‘Aunt Sally’, “often blamed unfairly for problems which are in fact caused by other laws and judgments”.
Why, then, did Lord Lester respond with such a vehement condemnation of the justice secretary’s words?
The interview does appear to undermine the Act’s principles: the Mail reports that “[Straw] argues that the act has suffered unduly in the public’s perception in the aftermath of 9/11 as Islamist militants have used it with great success to avoid deportation.” - however, it is hard to tell exactly where Straw’s voice becomes that of the notoriously conservative Middle England paper…
A little about Lord Lester: a human rights lawyer, the Liberal Democrat peer joined forces with the government in 2007 as Gordon Brown took over from Tony Blair.
He was appointed as a special advisor to Jack Straw, newly-appointed Secretary of State for Justice.
This piece of information, then, sheds some light on Lester’s position; for the secretary to undermine a piece of legislation which he helped bring in only a decade ago certainly would raise many eyebrows.
Lester accused Straw of pandering to the Daily Mail in his interview - but then, as the second most-read newspaper in the UK, and one which is not witholding in its criticism of the government, you can perhaps see why…
