This is clever

It’s easy enough to get terribly confused in the alphabet soup that surrounds any interaction with the European insititutions. Especially with such things as the Human Rights Act, the various European Courts and so on.

We have that old phrase, that justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done. I’d add a further clause, that it must be understood to be done as well. As, sadly, for all too many of us at the moment it isn’t.

For we’re told that we cannot deport a man and then the next day that we have to compensate him for keeping him in jail while we tried to deport him. Or something, I’m afraid even I’m getting confused here.

But this sounds like a rather neat solution:

Of course the Law Lords are not perfect. But they are far more capable of making decisions appropriate for Britain than the judges in the Strasbourg court. With some notable exceptions, the European judges are, to put it mildly, lightly qualified for the job of interpreting the Convention on Human Rights in a British context. Judges from Albania, Serbia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Russia, Romania and Latvia do not come from countries with a tradition of respect for the rule of law, or even much experience of it. One British observer has said that seeing how they come to their decisions is a bit like watching the East European judges in the Eurovision Song Contest. That’s an exaggeration – but you see his point.

The most incisively intelligent of the Law Lords, Lord Hoffman, has suggested opting out of the jurisdiction of the European Court now that the European Convention on Human Rights has been incorporated into our law. Can anyone seriously maintain that the judges in Strasbourg are more likely to reach wise decisions on how to apply human rights law in Britain than our own judges? Can it even be claimed that we would lose anything at all by reverting to the age-old system of having our own judges interpret our law, rather than having, as the ultimate authority, foreign judges who know nothing of it? To pose those questions is to answer them. The sooner we extricate ourselves from Strasbourg, the better for the rule of law in Britain.

Our judges interpreting our own laws? Something of an idea that, isn’t it? I think there might even be a word for it, a phrase….being sovereign, isn’t it?