In his speech, after a passing shot at the Blair government for its creation of ‘more than 3,000 new criminal or regulatory offences,’ describing these as ‘a wide range of acts which a century ago would have been regarded as casual misfortunes or as governed only by principles of courtesy,’ he attacked the behaviours of the European Court of Human Rights thus:
“The European Convention provides for its enforcement by an international court, the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg… The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg... has become the international flag bearer for judge-made fundamental law extending well beyond the text which it is charged with applying. It has over many years declared itself entitled to… reflect its own view of what rights are required in a modern democracy…Fair play to that juridical expert, say I. Foul play to those who have never bothered to point this stuff out before or take issue with the totalitarians down at the ECHR for exceeding their brief by an EU country mile.
It has involved the recognition of a large number of new rights which are not expressly to be found in the language of the treaty… This process necessarily involves the recognition by the Court of some rights which the signatories do not appear to have granted, and some which we know from the negotiation documents that they positively intended not to grant…
The Strasbourg court’s approach to judicial lawmaking gives rise, as it seems to me, to a significant democratic deficit in some important areas of social policy… Properly speaking, democracy is a constitutional mechanism for arriving at decisions for which there is a popular mandate. But the Convention and the Strasbourg court use the word in a completely different sense, as a generalised term of approval for a set of legal values which may or may not correspond to those which a democracy would in fact choose for itself… The treatment of the Convention by the European Court of Human Rights… allows it to make new law in respects which are not foreshadowed by the language of the Convention and which Parliament would not necessarily have anticipated when it passed the Act…
It would be odd to deny that this undermines the democratic process, simply because Parliament has done it. A democratic Parliament may abolish elections or exclude the opposition or appoint a dictator. But that would not make it democratic…
In many countries, including the United Kingdom, there is widespread disdain for the political process… This reflects the contempt felt by many intelligent commentators for what they regard as the illogicality, intellectual dishonesty and the irrational prejudice characteristic of party politics…
The judicial resolution of major policy issues undermines our ability to live together in harmony by depriving us of a method of mediating compromises among ourselves. Politics is a method of mediating compromises in which we can all participate, albeit indirectly, and which we are therefore more likely to recognise as legitimate…
I am not going to suggest that the fabric of society will break down because judges, whether sitting in London, Strasbourg, Washington or anywhere else, make law for which there is no democratic mandate. The process by which democracies decline is more subtle than that. They are rarely destroyed by a sudden external shock or unpopular decisions. The process is usually more mundane and insidious. What happens is that they are slowly drained of what makes them democratic, by a gradual process of internal decay and mounting indifference, until one suddenly notices that they have become something different.”
Anyway, I hope I get Lord Johnny when the bad guys finally get round to whacking me with that 'incitement to racial hatred' charge. Bit of an old 'democratic deficit' in that Brit-bashing device, I'd say. Seeing as such law was devised to hamstring us alone. As the alien colonised our lands and the ECHR types took the mickey.
By the way, for those who are new to Orwell, Newspeak and this blog, in layman's parlance, 'inictement to racial hatred' is much the same as telling the truth.
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