Parliament will debate a prisoner’s right to vote tonight, to satisfy the ECHR’s now infamous judgement. Jack Straw and David Davis, the progenitors of tonight’s discussion, have taken time to explain why they believe the ECHR does not have the right to dictate to sovereign states on such matters.
Writing for Con Home, Davis has constructed an impassioned polemic, decrying the British government’s ‘pusillanimous culture of concession’. Essentially, Jack Straw is making the same argument, albeit with precise procedural insight. He writes (£):
‘But is there some contradiction between my support for the HRA and my criticism of the Strasbourg court’s judgment in this case? Not at all. The reason is to be found in the title of the 1997 White Paper on the Human Rights Bill. It was “Rights Brought Home”. We had been subject to the European Convention on Human Rights and the Strasbourg court for half a century, but our courts and judges had never been able to adjudicate on issues in the convention because it had not been incorporated into UK domestic law.
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