Martin Parsons has argued that a Conservative government should re-write the Human Rights Act (HRA) to permit the deportation of Islamist terrorists to countries in which they would be tortured or treated in other inhumane ways. He suggests that this would be more in line with a "historic British" approach to human rights.
I disagree with Martin profoundly in this matter. I do not believe that we should extradite people to countries where they would be tortured, any more than that we should render them there so that they can be tortured on our behalf. Furthermore, I do not believe that the Human Rights Act restricts us in this any more than would the application of previous British concepts of liberty.
Next, I consider the whole concept that we might modify the Human Rights Act in this way exposes the key problem with the Human Rights Act - since the underlying thought is that the government creates rights, rather than takes liberties away, once we grant government this power, it will also assume the power to modify rights created. We should not modify the Human Rights Act. We should repeal it. And I disagree profoundly with those who suggest that this would make no difference if we remained signatories to the European Convention on Human Rights. Without the force of national legislation, a Human Rights Convention is simply a device of international approbation/disapprobation. If the European Court of Human Rights ruled against us, we would have to decide ourselves whether to abide by the ruling and modify our laws accordingly. We thus might sign up to a human rights convention based on fundamentally different concepts of liberty/rights, without undermining our own constitutional approach to these matters - it would just be that if-and-when we found a conflict between our concepts and those in the convention, there would be a dispute with other signatories.
The Human Rights Act seems to me to have created all kinds of problems. Here is one. In Britain, we used to grant a form of asylum to dangerous people that might be tortured if they were returned to their home countries. Obviously such dangerous people could not walk the streets, so we offered them secure accomodation - e.g. in Belmarsh prison. They were not held prisoner there - any time they wanted, they could leave and return to their own countries. If they wanted asylum, it was on offer. In 2004 the House of Lords ruled that the provisions under which foreign nationals were held at Belmarsh were incompatible with the Human Rights Act, because the same constraints on movement without charge or trial were not allowed to be applied to British nationals. This led directly to the Prevention of Terrorism Act, 2005, which allows the Home Secretary to impose "control orders" on anyone. Because this allows the state to control the movements of any of us - whether British or not - the Human Rights Act allows it. So we have the ridiculous situation that what started as a perfectly reasonable liberal measure - the offering of asylum to even very dangerous people - is transmuted via the Human Rights Act into a deeply illiberal measure allowing the Home Secretary to effectively place anyone under house arrest without need of a trial.
Such things happen because (a) people don't understand what liberty is, thinking wrongly that it is connected with concepts such as equality (though equality before the law is an extremely important principle in its own right); and (b) once the state takes unto itself the authority to create liberties, then it will also seek to modify them as needs must.
We should not be deporting people to be tortured, and we should not be modifying the Human Rights Act. We should be abolishing the Human Rights Act, and disavowing the hubris that it represents.
