Strasbourg, 26/01/2012 (Agence Europe) - On Wednesday 25 January, David Cameron, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, confirmed that it was indeed reform of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) that would form the pivotal thrust of the British presidency of the Council of Europe over the next few months.
In his preamble to the programme he had been invited to present during the winter session of the Parliamentary Assembly, he highlighted his country's historical support for fundamental rights and cited the Magna Carta (13th century), the Bill of Rights (17th century) and both the political and military commitment that his government had made to the Arab Spring. He said that one way of introducing legislation and taking action involved the British national character, its taste for freedom and its hatred of authority that was too powerful. These ideas could, perhaps, be related to a finely-honed speech by David Cameron during the plane journey to Strasbourg. This is because, according to Cameron and many others, the Court has never had as important and difficult a role but that this did not mean keeping things as they were in an institution that developed out of the European Convention on Human Rights, drafted more than 60 years ago in a continent that was just freeing itself from totalitarianism. Referring to the human rights situation in Belarus, the British prime minister insisted on the flagship role that the Court should play but then sounded a warning shot that they should not ask the institution to do too much and that filtering requests was not enough to significantly reduce the huge and suffocating burden upon it.
Although the Parliamentary Assembly advocated in its recommendation, addressed to the Council of Ministers and voted on Tuesday, that the jurisprudence of the ECHR law should be applied much more strictly and quickly by concerned governments in an effort to unblock the bottlenecks caused by repeated requests, David Cameron sees things differently. Using much more diplomatic terms, he said that the Court was open to individual requests from citizens from 47 member states of the Council of Europe and is obliged to respond to all of them willy-nilly. He mentioned the demand for €90 from an individual who had been dissatisfied with a bus journey (the demand was actually thrown out by the Court). Moving beyond this anecdote, which was obviously used to press home his message a little, Cameron is also concerned that the Court is becoming “a fourth instance” and the “cherry on the cake” for citizens dissatisfied with national judgments that had been, however, satisfactory.
In a reference to the decision demanding the right to vote for prisoners (with which the United Kingdom was reluctant to comply), as well as the question of illegal immigrants suspected of having ties with terrorism but which the Court prevented from being extradited because the individuals in question were in danger of being tortured or killed in their countries of origin, Cameron stated that such decisions discredited human rights in European societies and that he was concerned about this. He said that the time had come to begin practical and reasonable reform, which implied that the Court only intervene when issues of major human rights are not being respected. He added that it was up to national governments to assume responsibility for primary law protecting their citizens. He illustrated a system that was based on a relationship that went in two different directions, founded on unshakeable faith in human rights but also the questioning of one of the Court's fundamental components - the right for around 800 million citizens in all the member countries of the Council of Europe to individually lodge a complaint against their government after having exhausted all the other possibilities in their respective countries. This is also one way of helping develop national rights that are passing away. (VL/transl.fl)