Rights reform unlikely ‘without leaving EU’
Senior Conservatives’ desire to claw back human rights powers from Europe could prove unworkable unless the UK leaves the European Union altogether, the justice secretary has been told by his own officials. Chris Grayling has been advised by Whitehall mandarins that the UK would be able to pull out of the EU human rights charter only if it leaves the EU, after officials concluded that the UK must remain committed to the charter as part of its treaty obligations. The advice was set down in the Ministry of Justice’s review of the "balance of competences" between Westminster and Brussels. The study is part of a government-wide exercise to assess whether the EU rules are encroaching too far on British national life. Most of the reviews released to date, covering areas such as the internal market in goods and trade, tourism and the environment, have concluded that the balance of powers between the UK and the EU is broadly correct. But the MoJ review on fundamental rights was more nuanced, noting a "divergence of views on where the balance of competences should lie." The report comes as the Tories grapple with how to wrest back powers over human rights from the Strasbourg court and the European Union. Conservatives have long been calling on the prime minister to reassert the sovereignty of parliament over the European Court of Human Rights, which implements many of the rights in the EU human rights charter, and replace it with a ‘British bill of rights’. They have been incensed by decisions about prisoners’ voting rights and the extradition of Abu Qatada, a radical preacher. David Cameron appeared to be heeding those calls last month when he removed Dominic Grieve as attorney general. Mr Grieve flatly opposed the UK’s withdrawal from the ECHR which, he argued, would have damaging consequences for Britain’s reputation while also undermining human rights around the world. But the report suggests that the UK cannot withdraw from the EU human rights charter without triggering a wider transgression of treaty obligations. This could also have implications regarding withdrawal from the ECHR given that the Strasbourg European Court of Justice upholds elements of the EU charter. "The government’s position is that, as long as the UK is a member of the EU, it has a duty to implement all EU law that applies to it," officials concluded in the report. "Setting aside fundamental rights would amount to a failure to give full effect to EU primary law and would therefore constitute a breach of the UK’s treaty obligations." Some British judges have also expressed concern that parliamentary sovereignty is being exported, but many human rights lawyers maintain that the Conservatives’ attempts to intervene in human rights laws and the European Convention is both unworkable and undesirable. A Conservative spokesman said on Sunday. "Since we have yet to finalise our plans and decide between a number of options, any comment now is pure speculation. However, the next Conservative manifesto will contain radical plans to reform our human rights law, which a majority Conservative government will deliver."