Proud

Now and again Parliament does the right thing.

For they have now shown two fingers to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg who were insisting that British prisoners should have the vote.

It does not matter in this instance what MPs voted on and I can’t say that I have any sympathy for British prisoners who, in punishment for their crimes, have temporarily lost their freedom. The point is that our elected representatives have upheld Britain’s sovereign right to make its own decisions by defying demands from an unelected body consisting in some parts of people with no conception of our own ancient laws.

This may well be the ‘one small step’ to our Parliament paying more attention to what Strasbourg wants in comparison to what we as a sovereign nation wants. If so, what happened the other night is a very good thing.

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Let’s Do It!

A report by the centre-right think tank Policy Exchange has shown that European judges had overruled British law on on 26 occasions since Labour passed the Human Rights Act a decade ago.

Policy Exchange say there is ‘strong evidence’ that withdrawing from the Strasbourg court’s jurisdiction would not affect Britain’s membership of the EU and that Britain should press for major reform of the Strasbourg court to rein it in. If negotiations are unsuccessful then the UK should withdraw from Strasbourg.

The report’s findings are backed by one of Britain’s retired judges, Lord Hoffman, who believes that in recent years ‘human rights have become, like health and safety, a byword for foolish decisions by courts and administrators’.

It seems like a good idea to me to pull out and restore our own justice system. But will the government be brave enough to do it?
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A Nightmare

That arch-busybody in British affairs, the European Court of Human Rights, has ruled that sentenced prisoners should be allowed to vote, a privilege originally denied them by the Forfeiture Act of 1870.

Though it is said that the Prime Minister is ‘exasperated’ by the ruling, I can’t say that I can personally get too worked up by it, particularly as prisoners on remand awaiting trial, fine defaulters and people jailed for contempt of court are able to vote.

It does strike me, however, that organising a vote for prisoners - presumably those able to prove British citizenship - is going to be an administrative nightmare for the Prison Service, an organisation not often renowned for its speed of bureaucratic action. With a population sometimes moving between prisons and with some prisoners gaining early release, getting a vote organised efficiently throughout the prison system is going to take a great deal of detailed organisation.

But in theory, they would seem to have plenty of time to get it together.
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Morally Wrong

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Thirteen British pensioners who live abroad have lost the discrimination case they brought against the Department of Work and Pensions in the European Court of Human Rights.

This is the end of a long-running legal challenge that was effectively brought on behalf of half a million expatriate Britons whose UK pensions were frozen as of the dates they relocated. The judges in Strasbourg ruled that the British government’s refusal to update their pensions each year did not breach their human rights.

Government rules allow for annual increases to pensioners who live in the EU or in a few other countries with reciprocal pension arrangements, but not in 150 other countries such as Australia, Canada and South Africa. The International Consortium of British Pensioners, which supported the thirteen in this case, says that this means, for example, a pensioner who began drawing a full pension in Australia in 1981 will still be receiving £29.60 a week, although the basic UK state pension is now £95.25 a week.

Government ministers are said to concede that the existing rules are illogical but stubbornly refuse to make any concession to the expatriate pensioners affected. There seems no logical reason why pensioners living outside the EU who have been contributing to their pensions over their working lives like everyone else should not enjoy the same benefits as others.

I suspect the government’s position relates more to the cost of providing uptodate pensions to the estimated half a million people involved, rather than anything else. And, in the present economic climate, I can’t see any government altering their position.

Their position is morally wrong but, alas, there is no court in the world that will decide a case on its morality.
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