Our legal system is broken. It’s been messed up by those meddlesome Europeans and do-gooders who want to give rights to criminals, instead of punishing them. Our system needs the Tories to knock some sense back into it, by sending Europe, and its silly conventions, back where they came from.
So they want us to believe.
But is there some truth to it?
Well if the case quoted today is the best example of the failings of the Human Rights Act, I guess not.
Nicky Morgan MP, Secretary of State for Education, graduate in Jurisprudence of St Hugh’s College, Oxford and former corporate lawyer, discussed the issue on Radio 4’s “World at One” this lunchtime.
Asked if she supported leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, she answered as follows:
Well, I support getting some sense back into the way that the human rights legislation is applied in this country. An example that was given today… people who have committed terrible crimes… I think we’ve seen the coverage of a recent tragic case where a young girl was knocked down and then because it took so long to come to court, at that point the man was able to plead “right to family life”.
Well what about the right to the family life of the parents who lost their young daughter? And that’s the sort of thing that I think people want to see – we’ve made a clear manifesto commitment….”
She didn’t mention names, but the only case I can find which fits her description is the one of Aso Mohammed Ibrahim, an immigrant who ran down a girl, Amy Houston, while driving illegally in 2003. Not exactly ‘recent’, but there you go.
It is an appalling story. Ibrahim ran away from the scene, leaving Amy for dead under his car. She died later in hospital. Your heart has to go out to Amy and her family.
But Ibrahim didn’t get away with it. It didn’t “take so long to come to court”.
Ibrahim was prosecuted and served a prison term for his crimes. (It wasn’t a particularly long term, but that’s good old home-grown British law for you; no one is suggesting the HRA had any bearing on his punishment.)
He was prosecuted, he was convicted, he was punished.
But the father of Amy Houston campaigned for Ibrahim to be deported. Here the HRA did make a difference: it helped Ibrahim fight deportation under Article 8 (the ‘family life’ bit) because he had two children in the UK. But he had already been tried, punished and served his sentence. Deportation was not part of his punishment. The HRA had no bearing on his punishment.
But if you heard Nicky Morgan on the radio today, telling her story unchallenged, you’d think otherwise.
You’d think this was a recent case.
You’d think Ibrahim got off scot-free, all because of the Human Rights Act.
You’d think he was never prosecuted, or found guilty, or punished.
You would want the HRA taken out and shot.
Your blood would be boiling in exactly the way Tory scaremongers like Nicky Morgan want it to boil.
And let’s be candid: you’d be believing a bogus story about the Human Rights Act, told by a lawyer and Secretary of State.
A story so bogus as to be little short of a lie.
UK residents: you can hear the BBC interview here, at 17 minutes in.
P.S.
There’s a pattern in the way politicians are using phoney “commonsense arguments” to try to undermine things they don’t like, whilst covering up their genuine reasons and intent. A similar strategy is being deployed in the current attack on the BBC’s licence fee – see my take here.