Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Thursday, January 05, 2017

No EU, no Euro court

Sovereignty. Some politicians have always resisted diluting their nation's sovereignty. In the footsteps of the Brexit vote, some in the UK want to free the country from the scrutiny of foreign courts.

Ministers put British bill of rights plan on hold until after Brexit

Cameron

The government has accepted that it will have to put David Cameron’s plan to publish a British bill of rights on hold until after Brexit.

But senior Conservatives are pressing Theresa May to go further, and fight the 2020 general election on a pledge to pull Britain out of the European convention on human rights.

Cameron, May’s predecessor as PM, had planned to repeal the Human Rights Act, passed by the last Labour government to enshrine the ECHR in domestic law, and replace it with a distinct, and more limited, British bill of rights…

Leaving the ECHR would mean a british bill of rights would be enforced by the supreme court in London, rather than the European court of human rights in Strasbourg…

The ECHR, set up to safeguard basic human rights across the continent in the wake of the second world war… Britain as a founder member, and inspired by a proposal by the Conservative prime minister Winston Churchill, for “a charter of human rights, guarded by freedom and sustained by law”.

But some Conservative MPs, including many Brexiteers, believe the ECHR has overstepped its original purpose, and interferes too much in domestic policy…