Following its lengthy review of the Human Rights Act, the government has this week revealed its plans for reforming how human rights laws are interpreted, so that foreign offenders cannot claim a right to family life in the UK and pose a barrier to the authorities being able to deport them.
A new legal test would be introduced under the proposals, which would give judges the power to block certain cases from going to court and prevent what ministers call “abuse of the system”.
The “abuses” that the government refers to are cases where foreign nationals who commit offences in the UK invoke Article 8 of the Human Rights Act, the right to a family life, to “frustrate their deportation from the country.”
Justice secretary Dominic Raab [pictured] said that around 70 per cent of successful human rights challenges are made by foreign nationals who have invoked Article 8 in an appeal against a deportation order, and that the reforms will apply “common sense” to how the Human Rights Act is applied and “restore confidence” in the justice system by stopping such claims being upheld.
Notably, the proposals do not contain plans to change the law around the ability of the UK to turn away migrants who have crossed the Channel in boats and entered the country illegally.
Furthermore, despite pressure from Conservative MPs to break away from the European Convention on Human Rights entirely, the plans in their current form do contain a commitment to remain within it.
Raab said that the UK wished to “remain a party” to the European Convention on Human Rights and that the government’s aim was more to “change, reform” and “revise” how it is interpreted.
The proposals do say that a “right to trial by jury” in the UK will be recognised and contains commitments to uphold freedom of speech, which Raab described as a “quintessentially British right” and “the freedom that guards all the others.”
He said: “Freedom of speech does sometimes mean the freedom to say things which others may not wish to hear.”
The reforms would also change the parts of the Human Rights Act which require British courts to take Strasbourg caselaw into account, which would render the UK Supreme Court the highest authority in interpreting the European Convention on Human Rights when it is applied in UK cases, taking that power away from the European Court of Human Rights.
Raab outlined: “We will make it crystal clear that the UK courts are under no duty to follow Strasbourg caselaw which itself does not operate a doctrine of precedent.”
In response to the proposals, The Law Society has highlighted that under current laws, British courts can already choose to dismiss the views of the European Court of Human Rights if they feel they have sufficient legal reason.
Elsewhere in the reforms, the government is planning to issue a bill of rights to strengthen British rights such as freedom of speech and trial by jury, while proportionately applying laws to prevent abuses of the legal system.
Photo taken from Wikimedia Commons
