THE Conservatives provoked a row with the legal profession yesterday after blaming the Human Rights Act for spawning spurious legal claims and fuelling a “compensation culture”.
David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, announced plans for a commission to look in detail at how to change or repeal the Act, which incorporates into UK law the European Convention on Human Rights. Part of the commission’s brief would be to recommend ways to “check the escalating volume of ‘rights’ claims against the criminal justice system and other public bodies”, Mr Davis said.
He said: “The Human Rights Act has spawned too many spurious rights. It has fuelled a compensation culture out of all sense of proportion. And all too often, it seems to give criminals more rights than victims of crime. This has to stop.”
But several lawyers accused the Conservatives of perpetuating a myth that there had been an explosion in the volume of compensation claims and said Mr Davis was confusing litigation on grounds of negligence with claims under human rights law. Geoffrey Bindman, a leading human rights solicitor, said the Government’s restriction of legal aid had made it extremely difficult to pursue a human rights claim, and claims for compensation and challenges under human rights legislation were entirely different.
Mr Bindman told BBC Radio 4 World At One programme: “It seems to me a grossly inflated and alarmist notion of the effect of the Human Rights Act, which has been on the whole fairly small, but where it has been used it has been benign.”
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Edward Nally, president of the Law Society, pointed to a report by the Government’s Better Regulation Taskforce which concluded that the idea of a growing compensation culture to “urban myth”. He said: “There have been far fewer claims under the Act than most commentators expected, but there is greater awareness among public authorities of the need to respect basic principles of human rights.”
The number of cases brought under the convention had risen from an average of 15 a year before 1997 to 287 a year since 2000 when it took effect, Mr Davis said. Hitting back at his critics, he said lawyers “have an axe to grind” on the issue, as did the Better Regulation Task Force.