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Originally Posted by Derek L
a foreign establishment
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I've said it about a trillion times, but the ECHR is not a foreign establishment, it was set up by the British (specifically Sir Winston Churchill and Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe*) to teach the rest of Europe basic lessons about how to avoid a police state. For some reason in 1945, with fascists in Spain and Portugal and Stalinists running the Eastern Block and threatening power in France, Italy and Greece this seemed like quite a pressing issue. The rule remains: if your government repeatedly gets caught by the court doing something it shouldn't, get a new government.
It's also nothing to do with the European Union, which it predates by some years - the EU mandates signing up to the ECHR as a condition of membership, but not the other way round - the Court involves far more countries, under the auspices of the Council of Europe.
* A Conservative Home Secretary, Nuremburg war crimes prosecutor and the man who sent Derek Bentley to the gallows. The girly wet liberal.