Chris

Actually the way things are right now it's the ECHR that has backfired on us, remembering of course that it was us that invented the thing as a means of preventing any further little incidents brought about by dictators usurping democracy on the continent.

In its conception it's a great idea; unfortunately in execution - as it is currently being executed at any rate - it is becoming a means for activists* to themselves become the usurpers of democracy by passing judgments that overrule the settled will of our democratically elected, supposedly sovereign Parliament.

The HRA was an attempt to curb this by bringing the administration of our human rights obligations back on-shore so to speak, but all it has achieved is to import the whole human rights gravy train back into the UK without any beneficial effect, so far as I can see.

The whole thing needs torn up and re-thought from scratch. By all means go back to the original musings of the British politicians (including Winston Churchill) who brought the ECHR about, but then what should happen is that those good intentions should be codified in a Bill of Rights for the United Kingdom. Something that both serves the British people and is respectful of their democratic institutions which are far older and more stable than any of those the ECHR was originally designed to protect.

* I say "activists" because a lot of the "judges" in the European Court are nothing of the sort. They are supposedly legal experts but in many cases they are completely without the schooling in the letter and the spirit of the law that you would expect from a judge in a British court, and seem to think it is their remit to tell Governments what their laws should be, rather than respecting what those laws are.