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The European Court of Human Rights is Court flouting democratic self-government

Thursday 21 April 2011 at 8:03 pm | In News | Post Comment

Following Parliament’s rejection of votes for prisoners, a new Civitas report calls for urgent reform of human rights legislation to keep European judges from deciding British law.

Strasbourg in the Dock, by international lawyer and Conservative MP Dominic Raab, argues that judges have gone beyond their legitimate powers of interpretation in their now infamous Hirst ruling. He finds some of the European judges are ‘woefully lacking in experience’ and, as a consequence, ‘are undermining the credibility and value of the Court’.

‘[I]n 2007, only 20 of the 45 European judges had any prior judicial experience before joining the Strasbourg bench. By 2011, the judicial calibre had not improved much: 23 out of 47 of the judges had prior judicial experience.’
[p. 42-43]

He notes that

‘the judge for San Marino… only completed her training as a lawyer in 2002’
[p. 43]

and that some judges come from member states with poor institutional respect for human rights. Some have little understanding of the rule of law in more advanced democracies.

More from Civitas here