Britain should scrap the Human Rights Act because it is “dangerous for democracy,” a former Supreme Court judge has said before a long-awaited government review of the legislation.
Dominic Raab, the justice secretary, is preparing to announce the government’s plans next week. They are expected to stop short of repealing the 1998 Act, which enshrined the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law.
Lord Sumption has argued that it will be impossible for ministers to make “significant changes” to human rights laws while the convention is still enshrined in law. He has written a forward to a report by the Policy Exchange think tank, which submitted evidence to Raab’s review. The report argues that parliament should make a “fresh decision” on whether to amend or repeal the act because it has “unsettled the balance of our constitution”. The Times revealed yesterday that Priti Patel, the home secretary, had renewed attempts to force through more radical changes after calls from Conservative MPs to scrap the legislation altogether.
In his piece, Lord Sumption argued that the convention was fundamentally undemocratic. He said that the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg had “gratuitously expanded” the geographical range of the convention to include areas outside of its jurisdiction, such as warzones like Afghanistan. “These are wholly unsuitable environments for the application of elaborate Eurocentric schemes of human rights law,” he warned.
Raab is expected to publish proposals that would curtail the power of the court on public bodies in the UK such as the police and health service.
