The European Convention of Human Rights is developed and interpreted as times change; but is there a democratic imbalance when only lawyers and judges can do this? Particularly where the rights being litigated are not just matters of strict law but properly political issues.
It is a valid democratic concern that the Human Rights Act, which brought the European Convention into our own law, may encourage political questions to be converted into legal questions, taken to an unelected judge rather than to Parliament. Such wider political questions affect not just the rights of the individual but of society at large – and many consider that their voices on such matters are not being heard in the appropriate forum: Parliament.
Lord Bingham asked of the Human Rights Act, ‘Which of these rights, I ask, would we wish to discard?’ There have been very many important and good decisions reached with it, which might not have been without it.
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