For shame!

Sometimes it’s hard to be a blogger. It’s hard to decide which atrocity of all the atrocities we now read about daily is the one which requires the hardest defiance. Could it be the reports I read recently about how the British Ministry of Defence promotes private arms dealers? If there is one place where even trade liberalists should have second thoughts it is on the question of private arms dealing.

Could it be the continuing insistence on the part of the Swedish immigration authority, despite countless outcries from the general public, to extradite asylum-seekers to countries where their safety is in jeopardy, not just because the country to which they are to be extradited is in one of the stages of civil war, in which people with the profile of the asylum-seeker are at grave risk, but also because the person in question is often a former regime critic, who in all probability will be at least jailed for his criticism if not tortured and killed. And this extradition is usually done on the grounds that another government department has refused to acknowledge what all the world knows and acknowledges, that there is an armed conflict going on in the proposed recipient country.

Or could it be the New Zealand government lying down and playing dead for the US government and its corporate paymasters for the second time in a month over the closure of the file storage site, Megauploads? From the reports that are circulating the owner of this site is not being tried for running a pirate site in New Zealand and thereby – if the case is proved – depriving New Zealand artists and companies of income. He is being tried to determine whether he can be extradited to the US for trial.

But today I think the prize for the most disgraceful act by those in power is David Cameron’s attack on the European Court for Human Rights (ECHR). Here are some quotes from

“The Guardian’s”

report:

“Britain wants … to reform the work of the court so that it focuses on serious abuses of human rights in some of its 47 member states such as Russia and Ukraine.”

“The prime minister criticised the court’s decision to block the deportation of the Islamic cleric Abu Qatada to Jordan. “

We do have a real problem

when it comes to foreign nationals who threaten our security,” Cameron told [the] assembly.”

“Britain [i.e. Cameron] appeared to have won a significant victory in securing general support for reform when

members voted unanimously

on Tuesday night to agree that

the court should be “subsidiary” to national authorities

– governments, courts and parliaments – in guaranteeing human rights.”

“Cameron, who said that the court has a

backlog of 150,000 cases

, said it should not act as a court of fourth instance in states where domestic rulings are reasonable and in line with the convention.”

Turning the court onto serious abuses in states such as Russia and Ukraine is tantamount to giving it make-work which is not going to lead anywhere other than an annual statement on the state of human rights in Europe, to be lost amongst the latest football scores. And the fact that Britain might have a real problem does not justify their being able to throw the problem to the wolves.

I would have thought it was obvious to the average human being with a sense of justice that, if the court has a backlog of 150,000 cases, this is proof paramount that domestic rulings are not seen to be reasonable and in line with the convention. This in itself should be reason enough to ensure that national authorities should continue to be subsidiary to the ECHR. Most people would suggest that the solution is not a ‘sundown policy’ of writing off cases after two years, but extra funding so that the court can handle more cases and reduce the backlog. The people who put Cameron and his like in power clearly do not trust them, and it is this he is attacking when he attacks the ECHR.

It is also a matter of concern that this disgraceful suggestion was unanimously agreed to. Once upon a time, when the Council of Europe created the ECHR, there were some courageous thinkers involved, who may or may not themselves have been in positions of power within their own countries, but who, like the founding fathers of the US, could envisage that a time might come when the leaders of countries would again sink to the level of the worst offenders of the 20th century. To protect the general public from the worst excesses of these offenders, these courageous men and women established the ECHR to watch over the principles of human rights, rights which we every day now see under attack.

And now an unscrupulous and disgraceful gang of their inheritors, with Cameron in the vanguard, aware of and ashamed of what they are doing to their own subjects, and not wanting those subjects to have recourse to a higher instance, are moving to take away the authority of the one place where decisions out of tune with the general acceptance of what is right can be corrected.

For shame!

© James Wilde 2015