Law Weblog

Lord Hoffman director of Amnesty International says withdraw from European Court of Human Rights.

Tuesday 8 February 2011 at 7:54 pm | In News | Post Comment Lord Hoffmann, who has been a leading judicial advocate for human rights warns that the phrase has become a “byword for foolish decisions by courts and administrators”.

Lord Hoffmann cites the prisoner voting issue as an example of the way the Strasbourg court has taken “extraordinary power to micromanage the legal systems” of the member states which needs to end.

Writing the introduction to a report by the centre-right think tank Policy Exchange, Lord Hoffmann says: “Since 9/11 there have been enough real and serious invasions of traditional English freedoms to make it tragic that the very concept of human rights is being trivialised by silly interpretations of grand ideas.”

Lord Hoffmann argues that the list of human rights enshrined in the 1950 European Convention, which now forms part of British law, is “admirable”. But he says that since then they have been misinterpreted by judges in Strasbourg to such an extent that they have become discredited.