Read Desmond Swayne's latest blog on Human Rights - and cats!

I voted against the Human Rights act back in 1998 and I enthusiastically subscribed to an election manifesto last year seeking the authority of voters to repeal it.  Unfortunately that authority was withheld. Of course, it wasn’t a single issue election and there is no way of knowing what a majority of the electorate would have voted had that their judgement been confined to that one issue. They might have taken the view that nobody can be against human rights, and the more the better. My prejudice, however, is that they would have followed the line of the vast majority of my correspondents, to give you a flavour I’ll quote a recent email “stuff their rights, lock ‘em up and throw away the key”.

Whatever the voters intended, the result of their collective action was a coalition, one partner in which enthusiastically supports the Human Rights Act, but the other wanted to abolish it. The solution was a coalition agreement merely to review the working of the act. For my own part, this would never satisfy. I am wholly opposed to this sort of rights legislation which I believe gives creative opportunities to judges to place some people above the law. Whether the fellow to whom the Home Secretary referred in her speech last week was spared deportation because of the presence of a cat, or some other circumstance, be it a lover or whatever, matters not. The fact is that he was placed above the law and spared the proper penalty for his crime. Had another individual done as he did, but without possessing a cat or a lover, he would not have been spared. This is fundamentally unjust. It is, however, not only offensive to some abstract concept of justice, rather it is a significant threat to public safety: scores of terrorist suspects and other offenders are walking our streets because judges have put their rights above the law, the will of Parliament, and the elected representatives of all our people.

I have a much more fundamental view of our human rights: we have the right to live as we please and do as we wish so long as we do not break the law –which we are all equal before, and none of us -however mighty, is above. The real battle for those of us who value liberty is to constrain the ever present temptation to extend the law. Do not underestimate this struggle: the state, armed with all its coercive power already extends into private aspects of our lives and homes which free Englishmen would never have tolerated in the past. This legislative urge is universal, sometimes I wonder If am totally at odds with my constituents in opposing it. Daily they write to me suggesting new laws to govern our lives as a remedy to some real or imagined problem. Heavens! Some even write demanding that it be compulsory to vote.

So called rights which place some people above the law, be they cat owning shop lifters or terrorists and illegal immigrants with families, undermines the fundamental principle of equality before the law. Given my objection in principle to Human Rights legislation, I was not anticipating any satisfactory outcome from the commission reviewing the Human Rights Act. I thought it better to let matters fester -let all the frogs in the bog hatch out, and then have another go at the voters, presenting them this time with a starker choice and making it the defining difference between the political parties.  I have changed my mind however, the matter is too important to await an election that is still three and a half years away. We need to put aside principle and find a compromise –even a messy one- which limits the damage and constrains the judges in their interpretation of the Act.

I do not deny that judges have defended our liberty at vital moments throughout our Island history, but their interpretations of the Human Rights Act are a now threat to that liberty, and we must look to Parliament to defend it.  The rights of cats can safely be left to the Cats Protection League.