Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajvs | Hacker News Reader

What human rights are you even implying here? Because this sounds like a wild accusation.

UK politicians, especially those on the right, were never big supporters of the European Convention on Human Rights and often express their desire to circumvent it (see the linked Guardian article in another comment), or to remove its applicability from UK law altogether.

Supporters of human rights may find comfort in the fact that the UK is actually bound to the ECHR by various international agreements, including the Good Friday Agreement. This severely limits politicians' ability to scrap its applicability altogether, despite their repeated promises to the contrary. This excellent blog post from June summarizes all this well: https://davidallengreen.com/2022/06/oh-no-not-again-the-stor... .

Most recently the UK government introduced a "Bill of Rights". Despite its name, it changed little with respect to the applicability of the ECHR, but it does make it harder (again) for litigants to rely on the Convention in practice.

(Note that the ECHR, both the court and the convention, are completely separate institutions from the EU.)

> UK politicians, especially those on the right, were never big supporters of the European Convention on Human Rights

the European Convention on Human Rights was mostly drafted by a tory

the modern tory party's problem with the ECHR are its ability to create new law that is not subject to democratic oversight, namely around positive obligations

For example: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jun/14/european-cou...

The ultras want to sever the UK's ties to European human-rights institutions, such as the ECHR.

But isn't that organization mostly used for political persecution, only under the guise of human rights' interests? Haven't they only gone after politically-unpopular-in-the-west entities, and never after the real egregious human rights violators?

No.

You may have a misunderstanding of what the ECHR is. A party can make an application to the ECHR against a member state of the Council of Europe (not the same as the EU) that that member has breached an article of the agreed European Convention on Human Rights. They don't "go after" individuals.

I see, thank you. I now see with which organization I had confused the ECHR.

I think they're referring to the move to repeal human rights laws in the UK

There is no move to do that. They are moving to make the UK Parliament sovereign.

The Parliament of the UK has an appalling record on human rights in Northern Ireland, where the ECHR has long been the authority to which cases are appealed. Withdrawing from the ECHR both de facto and de jure weakens the human rights protections for residents of Northern Ireland.

Perfidious Albion cannot be trusted when it comes to Northern Ireland, at least.

The UK Parliament ratified the Treaty? How is its sovereignty violated by something it itself agreed to?

It isn't, of course. It's just an article of faith now that anything Europe must be replaced. Anything that particularly gives something to do with Europe power is a threat to them.

During the referendum, it was a different story. Just the EU that was the problem. Nobody is talking about leaving the single market, no sirree!

They gave away powers, now they are taking them back.

This is a point you can make, but it's distinct from sovereignty being infringed. If Parliament is sovereign, it can decide to give away powers, no?

There is literally a move to do that. They are openly campaigning to repeal the Human Right Act and replace it with something that strips away most protections that are currently available to people whose human rights are violated by government.

The main changes being proposed are to give the government of the day more power and less judicial oversight, not parliament. Most changes are about removing people's ability to take the government to court. So it is the government of the day that becomes more sovereign, not parliament.

The changes don't affect parliament at all.

UK parliament is and always was ultimately sovereign on these issues. That was already true, with or without the Human Rights Act, and even when the UK was in the EU. (Otherwise there would have been no need for the UK to create its own Human Rights Act.)

In fact it was the UK parliament that put this judicial oversight of government in place in the first place by passing the Human Rights Act. Fashions change, and the current lot in power want to take the oversight away again.

>> There is literally a move to do that. They are openly campaigning to repeal the Human Right Act and replace it with something that strips away most protections that are currently available to people whose human rights are violated by government.

I don't recognise your characterisation, but that would be the ideal. That is not what is currently in process though.

>> The main changes being proposed are to give the government of the day more power and less judicial oversight,

Well, it gives the UK people more power. The elected government is a proxy for that.

>> UK parliament is and always was ultimately sovereign on these issues. That was already true, with or without the Human Rights Act, and even when the UK was in the EU. (Otherwise there would have been no need for the UK to create its own Human Rights Act.)

Yes, in as much as they decided, as sovereign, to give powers away. They are now as you say taking those powers back.

> There is no move to do that. They are moving to make the UK Parliament sovereign.

Oh I'm sorry, they're just replacing them with ones that can be enforced or ignored at will

Reply on news.ycombinator.com