Rights Gone Wrong?

Human rights - we're told they're out of control,

that Britain's in the grip of a cabal of lawyers

and judges doing Europe's dirty work, taking away the rights

of victims to protect the rights of people who don't deserve them.

Foreign criminals are allowed to stay in the country

because of a cat!

Police won't put up "Wanted" posters in case the mug shot

violates the suspect's rights!

The whole issue of human rights is sometimes

distorted by misinformation

and tabloid outrage but it concerns matters we all care about.

Like the case of Abu Qatada,

the radical Islamic preacher who supports terrorism

but whom human rights laws say

can't be send back to his own country for trail.

It gives rights to one individual, even when that one individual

could be a threat to the rest of the British population.

Parliament being ordered by judges to do things it thinks wrong.

What the Supreme Court haven't done

is they haven't considered the victims and our experience.

The question has to be asked, "Who is running the country?"

It even forces us to do things most of us are dead against,

like giving prisoners the right to vote.

The reality is that the highest court in Europe has ruled

that murderers, rapists, people convicted of manslaughter

are entitled to their human rights. Parliament have already

been found guilty. They're the prisoners now, the hostages.

In this film, I'll try to cut through the hype and confusion

to discover how our commitment to human rights,

in this oldest of democracies,

has gone from a universal belief that arose out of the ashes

of the Second World War to a political poison that now threatens

to undermine popular support for the very concept of human rights,

and to show how ultimately this question goes to the very core

of how this country is governed.

I spend my life covering events as they happen over there.

I grill politicians every day in the studio

just across the road from Parliament.

Good afternoon and welcome to The Daily Politics...

And I know just how angry our human rights laws are making many of them.

The law is an ass!

There would be less shame

in leaving the European Convention on Human Rights

than in giving prisoners the vote.

The criminals that use the Human Rights Act to try and stay,

we are clamping down on each and every one of them.

The politicians are worked up but are they right to be?

There's plenty of distortion

and things are not always as they seem.

Take the "Wanted" poster. The police insist human rights laws

had nothing to do with their actions.

Having a cat won't keep you in the country

but having a family with a cat might well do.

I want to find out the truth so I'm going to get out

of Westminster to find out what's really going on.

Let's start at the beginning - our modern human rights laws

and the controversy they've caused stem from a set of rules

called the European Convention on Human Rights.

The document itself is pretty innocuous and short.

It guarantees the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.

Everyone has the right, it says, "to freedom of expression."

Everyone has the right, "to freedom of peaceful assembly."

Now, who could object to rights like that? Certainly not me.

They've been at the core of British democracy

for a very long time but something is going wrong in practice.

For many people now, the European Court protects

the rights of some of the nastiest people in society

while riding roughshod over families and their victims.

I'm heading to East Lancashire to meet a dad whose life

has been shattered by one of the cases which has provoked

the loudest outrage, even from liberal commentators.

Blackburn, a former mill town, now facing hard times.

Paul Houston has lived round here all his life.

In 2003, his 12-year-old daughter, Amy, left the family home

with her brother to head to the shops to buy a new CD

from her favourite boy band.

So Paul, Amy was coming along this pathway here?

That's correct and she just had one road to cross

and she was going to cross to catch the bus over there

and that's when Mr Ibrahim struck her with a motor vehicle

and she was under the wheels of the... Erm, she was on the bonnet

of the car and then she slipped under the...the front wheels

of the motor car and the weight of the car landed

on top of her, basically.

Behind the wheel was failed asylum seeker

Aso Mohammed Ibrahim from Kurdistan in Northern Iraq,

a petty criminal with a string of convictions.

A year before he ran Amy down, he'd lost his final appeal against

deportation and been told by the UK Border Agency to leave the country.

He didn't and the Border Agency hadn't got round to removing him

before he killed Amy.

When...this terrible thing happened, and Amy then fell off

the bonnet on to the wheels, what then happened?

Mr Ibrahim got out of the car, he saw that Amy was trapped

-and he ran off in that direction.

-He just ran away?

And he just left her trapped under the wheels of the motorcar.

She was still alive at the time.

I wasn't quite prepared for... for what I saw

when I got to the hospital.

She was laid out on a table with just tubes in her

and I just... I couldn't take it in.

I was... I was absolutely horrified.

And the hospital left you in no doubt that the toughest

decision of all had to be taken?

To switch the life support machine off and watch your child stop breathing,

and there's nothing you can do about it,

it's just the worst feeling in the world.

Ibrahim served just a couple of months but you might think

when he got out, there'd be nothing to stop us slinging him

out of the country PDQ, like we used to with foreign criminals.

But you'd be dead wrong. After Amy's death,

he married an English woman and started a family.

So a judge ruled that to send him back to Kurdistan, even though

it's the safest and richest part of Iraq,

would breech their right to a family life.

He was able to say, and the judge agreed with him,

"You have a right to a family life here in Britain,

"so you don't have to go back."

-That's right.

-But he took away your right to a family life.

Absolutely. You know, it's about balance

and this is one of the things I've always argued. It's about

balance and fairness. Where's my rights of family life, you know?

You lost your family.

Absolutely, you know and where's Amy's right to life?

That's another human right.

The Ibrahim case provoked outrage

but he isn't the only foreign criminal who can't be deported.

Take Pakistani immigrant Raja Mohammed Anwar Khan, convicted

of causing death by dangerous driving when he ran down an innocent

father of two, Peter Jolly, while coming down from a heroin high.

Khan's wife and two sons were living in the UK.

At the end of his jail time, a judge stopped him

being deported back to Pakistan.

"To do so," ruled the judge, "would be a disproportionate

"breech of his family life under human rights laws."

Or Rohan Winfield from Barbados, convicted of twice raping

a young woman but unable to be sent home when he was

released from prison because he had fathered two children in the UK.

The human rights rules stepped in to protect - you've got it -

"his right to a family life."

Paul has fought hard to honour Amy's memory by trying

to change our human rights laws.

You don't have a problem with human rights as such, do you?

No, I agree with human rights.

I think human rights is a good thing,

you only have to look at Egypt and Libya and Syria, they need human rights.

To see what it's like in a society without human rights.

Absolutely, you know. Basic human rights is...is...

it's essential in society, that we have respect for one another

but it's the interpretation and it's been that stretched now,

it no longer represents or does the job that it's supposed to do.

Paul's experience and the views that it's given him

illustrate a potential problem for human rights in this country.

If judges continually make rulings that the decent mainstream

majority of this country regards as unacceptable then the danger is

that that decent majority is going to become increasingly

hostile to the very idea of human rights.

And it's not just bereaved families

who feel they're on the wrong end of our human rights laws.

There's serious concern that all our security is being threatened

by the over-reaching tentacles.

John Reid was Tony Blair's last Home Secretary and to borrow a phrase

from his boss, "He's got scars on his back from the way

"our human rights rules seem stacked in favour of those

"who threaten terror."

It gives absolute rights to one individual, even when that

one individual may be a threat to the rest of the British population.

We were prohibited from taking into account the potential effect

of terrorism or murder on the other 64 million people.

-You mean the rights of everybody else?

-That's unbalanced.

NEWSREADER: A judge's verdict leaves anti-terror laws in disarray.

A High Court ruling says terror suspects have human rights too.

As Home Secretary in 2006,

John Reid's flagship policy of control orders were struck out.

The judges ruled that virtual house arrest for terror suspects

amounted to indefinite detention without trial.

And the irony of all of this is the very first right

enshrined in European Convention of Human Rights is the right to life

and yet when you are considering the threat to all

of the British citizens and their lives,

from one person, you can not weigh that in the balance.

So you end up in the position where you can't deport someone

because of one of the articles of the European Convention

of Human Rights and you cannot detain them either

because that contravenes another one.

So, somehow, we have to stop people playing that system.

Nobody's been better at playing the system than Abu Qatada.

Despite an immigration tribunal stating, "He was heavily involved,

"indeed, at the centre, of terrorist activities associated with Al-Qaeda,"

the European Court of Human Rights says he can't be deported

because some of the evidence against him

might have been obtained by torture.

So you're saying that because of cases like Abu Qatada

and other cases where bad people seem to be protected

and victims are often left dangling in the wind, that brings

the whole human rights concept into disrepute in the public's eyes?

I'm saying that God forbid it should happen but if there was some

major atrocity, which people could point to as having at least

part of its causation in the Government's inability to remove

certain people, to detain them, to deport them, to keep them in

protective custody, then the backlash in this country would be huge and

it wouldn't be an impulse to improve upon the European Convention of

Human Rights, it would be a public demand that we derogate from it

completely, we leave it completely, and I don't want to see that happen.

John Reid served at the heart of a government,

which introduced our current human rights laws but if even he regrets

how that's turned out in practice, something really must be amiss.

So how did we get here? Only one way to find out.

Where would we be without Europe?

German cars, Italian fashion, Belgian chocolate,

Spanish sun... Oh, yes of course! French Champagne.

I love Europe. It's why I try to spend as much time there as I can

but has it also lumbered us with a zealous obsession with human rights,

which flies in the face of a British sense of justice and fair play?

Wish me bon voyage, as I head to the heart of darkness.

I'm taking the train to Strasbourg,

the French town on the German border where the Human Rights Convention

was drawn up and where today the court, which enforces it, presides.

And where Brits anxious to enforce their human rights have the final right to appeal.

Delve deep into the history of the European Convention

and prepare to be shocked.

For far from it being some foreign continental conspiracy,

the concept of a Europe-wide charter of rights

was very much a British idea.

More than that, the guiding force behind it wasn't some French federalist

or Luxembourg lefty or even a British bureaucrat.

It was none other that the greatest of great Britons.

That's right, cue Sir Winston Churchill.

We hope that this congress and the efforts,

which will be made by all, will do some good.

In 1948, the man who saved Europe gathered grandees

from across the continent in Holland to outline his grand vision.

Europe can only be united by the heartfelt wish and vehement

expression of the great majority

of all the people in all the parties in all the freedom-loving countries

no matter where they dwell or how they vote.

Now can you believe it? The newsreels cameras cut out before he started

talking about human rights but this is what he said.

"In the centre of our movement

"stands the idea of a Charter of Human Rights.

"We aim at the eventual participation

"of all European peoples.

"We welcome any country where the people own the government

"and not the government the people."

In the immediate aftermath of the defeat of Nazi tyranny,

who could blame him for such high-blown sentiment

or the audience for its fulsome applause.

And Winston's weren't the only Tory fingerprints on a document

today's Tories regard with such suspicion.

Churchill may have had the vision

but he left the detail to another Conservative.

1949, the year I was born, and in this magnificent chamber,

the first gathering of the Council of Europe to draft

new human rights rules for a divided and war-torn continent and leading

it all, a hanging and flogging Tory grandee called David Maxwell Fyfe.

His name may be forgotten now but if I tell you that just two years later

when Churchill returned to power,

he became arguably the hardest line Home Secretary of recent history,

you'll see that this was hardly some "red under the bed"

intent on destroying British tradition.

INTERRUPTS: Just wait a moment.

Are you telling this tribunal

that you knew nothing about the effect in Austria?

Instead, inspired by what he heard as a prosecutor at the

Nuremburg War Trials, he was in charge of drawing up the document,

putting into action Churchill's vision. Even now, this crusty Tory

is revered around here as "the father of the Convention."

So the Convention was now from its inception

a radical or alien manifesto.

It merely enshrined a number of basic human rights

that most Brits took for granted,

to guard against a return to the horrors of Nazi tyranny.

Hitler had spoken in this very hall and to contrast with

the barbarity then unfolding from the other side of the Iron Curtain.

So this was really sort of "No more Nazis"?

Never the Nazis again?

Exactly right. It was "No more Nazis" but also it was concern about the Soviet Union.

The Council here was saying, "What you do behind your own borders is no longer

"just a matter for you, cos that way led to the concentration camps."

Yes, exactly. Yes, effectively, they were saying,

"No, you can't just decide this is your sovereign state.

"You can do what you want to your own people,"

because that's what happened in Nazi Germany and obviously led to atrocities.

Instead they were saying, "No, we are going to allow your own citizens

"to complain about you,

"to take a case to the European Court of European Rights."

Once the court was set up in 1959.

And the court is able to find a violation against your own state.

That was the major breakthrough that occurred.

So they set up these rights, as you say, basic rights, that

-the British had taken for granted...

-Yeah.

-Still do.

-Yeah.

What then happened?

Because we had states with, on the whole, quite strong democratic

traditions and respect for human rights,

then we didn't see large scale violations of human rights

of the type that the convention was set up to deal with.

Instead we saw certain minorities such as prisoners,

sexual minorities, gaining protection.

So in a way, fairly peripheral in terms of the kind of violations

-that they had in mind.

-What the founding fathers had in mind.

-Exactly, yeah.

Not dramatic large-scale violations of rights

but on the other hand, the Convention was used in important ways

to improve the lot of certain of certain minorities.

Post-war prosperity meant the Convention wasn't needed

to stop dictatorship returning to Western Europe but as Helen says,

in its early days, the court did pass judgment

on important cases from Britain.

It ruled against corporal punishment in schools

and restricted the state's power to intercept phone calls.

But they weren't all what could be seen as left-wing rulings.

In the early 1980s, the court ruled against the trade union closed shop.

That put a smile on the Thatcher Government.

And the court advanced what were then seen as controversial rights,

which today we take for granted, most famously perhaps

when Strasbourg ruled that gay men

and women should be allowed to serve in the British Armed Forces.

Today, the forces take part in Gay Pride parades

but even in the '90s, the case lost in every British court.

Gay service personnel fighting their sackings had to spend years

bringing their cases all the way to Strasbourg.

I know all about the long road to Strasbourg. In the '80s,

as editor of The Sunday Times,

I serialised a book called Spy Catcher.

Great, soon as you can...

It blew the lid off the workings of the British Security Services.

There it is, Spy Catcher in Britain.

I think that in the issue of Spy Catcher,

the press in Britain is now less free than it's been

at any time in peacetime Britain in this century.

The Thatcher Government tried to ban it.

It even tried to put me in jail.

After a series of interminable court cases in which British judges

proved rather less than enthusiastic about "freedom of the press,"

we brought the case to Strasbourg and won 24-0.

But it had taken years and cost millions.

It's clear the Strasbourg Court has played a crucial role

in enhancing human rights in Britain.

So why all the rows about it today?

Well, as the court has grown in confidence,

it's also grown in reach, in ways the founding fathers never imagined.

Most of us get confused about these European institutions,

which sound the same but do different things

in different buildings.

Let's bust our first myth - the European Convention

has nothing to do with the Common Market, the European Community,

the European Union or even this European Parliament.

Instead, the Convention is part of a completely different club called

the Council of Europe. It's bigger, even more unwieldy than the EU

and less fussy about who it lets through the front door.

The court certainly needs a substantial building.

There are now 47 countries signed up to the European Convention.

Each one is allowed to send a judge to this court here in Strasbourg.

The current president is a Brit but it means that some cases

involving British human rights can involve judges who come

from countries who's own human rights record

is pretty questionable.

Moldova, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Russia.

Do all 47 member countries take as much notice of the Convention

and the court's rulings as the Brits?

Of course not. Some members regularly breech the most basic provisions of the Convention

and take scant notice of the court

when it rules against them time and time again.

Strasbourg has to wrap itself up against the icy blasts

that swoop down from Siberia

but that's not the only unwelcome guest it receives from Russia.

Over a quarter of the court's backlog of 150,000 cases

emanate from the Great Bear.

That's something this feisty, brave lawyer knows only too well.

Karina Moskalenko is the leading Russian advocate in Strasbourg.

Her caseload swells almost daily.

It's torture, it's killings, disappearances...

..unfair trials, illegal arrests, unlawful detention, violation

-of right to free expression.

-And it's to defend these kinds

of rights under threat in Russia

-that the European convention was created?

-Yeah, exactly.

When Russia loses in front of the Strasbourg Court,

do they stop the abuse of human rights?

-Not yet. Not...

-So they don't?

They do not but some of the abuses,

they keep in mind that it is not permissible to do that.

Is it dangerous standing up for human rights in Russia?

Of course, you know, some of my friends already not alive.

Russia may be the biggest breaker of Convention rules but it's far

from the only signed-up country that doesn't live up to its ideals.

Take Azerbaijan, accused by human rights groups of harassing

human rights activists and arresting political opponents and as you

can see here, they're not too keen on the rights of protesters either.

Remember Azerbaijan is a signatory to the Convention.

Even the record of Western European democracies is patchy.

France lost three times as many cases here as Britain last year

and the Italians are notorious for turning a blind eye

to Strasbourg's decisions when they're inconvenient.

So why do we in Britain take the pronouncements so seriously?

So seriously, in fact, we gold plate the Convention.

We passed an act that ensures all our laws have to adhere

to its provisions.

Back at the very dawn of New Labour, Tony Blair, a lawyer by training,

gave the legal establishment something it had always wanted.

He took the European Convention

and wrote it into British law as the Human Rights Act.

Now this placed human rights at the very centre of British public life.

It made it illegal for schools, hospitals,

the police to act in defiance of human rights.

It meant public servants had to second guess their actions

in case they ended up in court and for those who still thought

their human rights were being abused but didn't like the judgment

of British Courts, they could still chance their luck in Strasbourg.

Harehills in Leeds feels a long way from Westminster

but it's on these streets that they feel the fallout of our British

obsession with taking the human rights rule so literally.

Jasvinder Sanghera is the driving force behind the charity Karma Nirvana.

Based here in Leeds, it wins praise for its work

with victims of forced marriages.

You stared campaigning against forced marriages

because you were almost forced into one yourself?

Absolutely and I was 14.

I came home from school one day, my mother presented me with a photograph

and I was to learn I was promised to this man when I was eight.

This was a photograph of your supposed future husband?

Absolutely and I was thinking about my homework and school.

I said "no" and as a result of protesting my parents took me

out of school when I was 15.

I was held a prisoner in my own home for a number of weeks,

missing from education, not being noticed and I agreed in order

to buy back my freedom but then I ran away from home.

I saw an opportunity when I was almost 16,

and my family were very clear. "You either come back home

"and marry this stranger or you are now dead in our eyes."

There are some horrendous stories associated with forced marriages.

And you've got personal experience of that.

-All your sisters went into forced marriages.

-Yes.

One of them had a terrible ending.

My sister was 24-years-old

-when she set herself on fire.

-She set herself on fire?

She did and she suffered over 80% burns.

You only set yourself on fire if you're enduring a living hell.

Mmm, absolutely.

Motivated by her tragic experience, Jasvinder has been helping those in the same plight.

She also campaigned to raise the age to 21 before anybody

could come into Britain from outside Europe to get married.

She won! Parliament made 21 the law.

-So you had all the parties behind you?

-Yes.

-Parliament spoke?

-Absolutely.

-The people spoke?

-Absolutely.

-And you got the change

-and did that change make a difference in your view?

-Yes, in my view, it did.

What we evidenced quite clearly on the helpline

and from face to face interaction with victims, them telling us

that this rule has actually saved us from being forced into a marriage,

it's given us more time, it's allowed us to enter into education.

It's allowed a ground for compromise even for some family members.

But Jasvinder's law was challenged under the Human Rights Act

by Brits determined to marry someone under 21 from abroad.

Their right to a family life won.

Her law was struck down by the UK's Supreme Court.

So you had this new law in place?

-Yes.

-You think it was working?

-Absolutely.

-And then the Supreme Court came along

and said no, this is contrary to the Human Rights Act?

Me personally and certainly the team

and for all the victims out there, it is a severe blow.

A blow because what the Supreme Court haven't done is

they haven't considered the victims and our experiences

and our right to have human rights and not to be abducted,

kidnapped, raped, abused, which is what forced marriage is.

Did it every cross your mind

when you were campaigning for this that a forced marriage

is one of the worst transgressions, one of the worst abuses of human rights.

And yet you've been scuppered by the Human Rights Act?

It beggars belief.

The question has to be asked, "Who is running the country, here?"

This as far as I'm concerned was a Government decision that

should have been upheld and sadly the judges have let us down.

And as a result of that, they have given power to the perpetrators.

Talking to Jasvinder, it's pretty clear that

when it comes to the abuse of human rights,

forced marriages is up there with the worst of them.

So you would think that our human rights legislation, our courts,

the Strasbourg Convention, they'd all pile in on the side of the victim.

But it hasn't worked out like that. Our UK Supreme Court has

ruled against one measure that many thought would be

effective in stamping out forced marriages.

It did so even though Parliament had voted for it by a massive majority.

Jasvinder's case isn't the only one where our courts have

overruled our legislators in Parliament.

Take the controversial issue of the Sex Offenders' Register.

Just last year, two convicted sex offenders turned

to our human rights laws, there aim to get sex offenders

the right to appeal against lifelong inclusion on the register.

They won. The Government had to climb down,

despite the Home Secretary saying she "was appalled at the decision".

Behind the decisions that so annoy politicians

and the public a whole new human rights industry has shot up.

The Human Rights Act has certainly been lucrative for the legal profession.

It may even have helped to pay for a Ferrari or two round here.

You can see why the legal establishment was so keen

to bring it in but do they now accept it's creating huge problems in practice?

This is a question of balance and proportionality

-and I do...

-Human Rights lawyers don't come any more radical,

successful or outspoken than Michael Mansfield.

A lot of people just thought this whole human rights business

had become an industry which had made lawyers rich.

-Absolutely not.

-But lawyers have made quite a few bob out of it?

No, I'm sorry, they have not

and I you know I certainly would like to see the evidence for that.

Absolutely not.

-This is not a money-making machine and in fact.

-But whole chambers

-have sprung up who's raison...

-Well, of course,

-are chambers that specialise in all kinds of things.

-In human rights?

-Of course.

-Which didn't exist 20 years ago right?

No, of course not because it there wasn't a human rights agenda then.

But the people there are not exactly on the breadline, are they?

Well, I... So you're not on the breadline

and lots of people are not on the breadline

but that doesn't mean to say that they're earning vast sums of money.

These are sort of allegations that are thrown about,

-I don't know where they come from.

-I'm putting them to you for you to give me your reply.

-My reply is

I don't know where it comes from and I don't agree with it.

Parking the clearly sensitive issue of money,

surely Michael Mansfield gets the anger out

there about how the human rights laws are being interpreted.

You're a great champion of the human rights

and of human rights legislation that

because of some rulings like that, which don't strike the public mood

as right, that you bring the whole thing into discredit?

Well, the assumption here is that they don't strike the public mood.

Now who is assessing the public mood in these cases?

In other words, you say that

but I get a lot of feedback from people who are very supportive

of the Human Rights Act because, for example, journalists' sources

have been protected, disclosure of information for people who want to

bring actions against the Government making the Government accountable.

They're all saying, in these cases, it's great,

it's provided accountability where it didn't exist before.

So again I'm not over-convinced that the public mood is, it's not working.

No and I'm sure there are judgments that the court makes,

which are popular with public opinion

and they don't get the coverage, I understand that point.

But are you telling me that if we had an opinion poll on

whether Abu Qatada, for example, should be allowed to stay

in this country, that there wouldn't be a huge majority of us

-sending him to Jordan?

-First of all, I don't think I want the legal system

-governed by opinion polls, first of all.

-But you mention popularity.

No, you did.

You're, concerned about popularity,

I'm not concerned about... I'm concerned about the public conscience,

which isn't quite the same.

Take Qatada, very interesting how the tabloids mainly have responded to that.

-On the day that Qatada was decided there was another case.

-About life imprisonment?

Yes. Did that get the same coverage? Not at all

but the people who get upset about the Human Rights Act would have said

if they knew, they would probably have said, "Yes, Strasbourg is right.

"When life is given as a life sentence." The Strasbourg Court

was saying that the British Courts were quite entitled to have

that as a provision, that the public would probably support it.

I don't know but that gets very little publicity.

Qatada gets a lot of publicity.

Mike Mansfield has a point. It isn't just terror suspects

and sex offenders who can use our human rights Laws.

There are plenty of cases involving people who elicit

real public sympathy.

-I feel like I've won the lottery.

-Take breast cancer patients

battling to get the life-prolonging drug Herceptin.

When the NHS wouldn't stump up, they used the Human Rights Act to

force the authorities to provide it.

Or the elderly married couple never apart for 65 years

until the council put them in different care homes.

Until the Human Rights Act stepped in and reunited them.

But even if you feel these cases are just, it's still judges

overruling our elected politicians in vital policy areas

and the supremacy of Parliament being overridden.

Hull.

Known as the home of John Prescott, The Housemartins and white phone boxes.

But it's also famous or infamous as the home of a man whose

use of human rights laws makes many uncomfortable.

£1.45 for a big pie like that, beautiful.

He's taken the Government to Europe to win the right for prisoners to vote.

When you lost in the British High Court

and then in the Appeal Court, did you think then of giving up?

I didn't expect the British establishment to give me justice.

I don't believe the British justice system is the best

in the world. My view is British justice is the worst in the world.

So you're a fan of the Strasbourg Court

and of the European Convention?

I'm probably one of their number one fans. I'm actually a human rights defender,

which is something that the Council of Europe has set up.

Mr Hirst hasn't always had such regard for human rights.

In 1979, he killed his landlady, Bronia Burton,

hitting her seven times with an axe.

Convicted of manslaughter, he spent 25 years in prison.

He studied law behind bars

and campaigned relentlessly for prisoners' votes when released.

In 2005 he was successful. Strasbourg Court ruled that

"the right to participate in elections had been violated,"

a ruling that outraged our politicians.

The then Labour Government and the current coalition

so far refuse to enforce the ruling and put ballot boxes in jails.

Do you understand what people feel if you look at this situation

in this country, the Conservative Party's against prisoners' votes,

the Labour Party's against prisoners' votes, the judges ruled

against you, the House of Commons has ruled against you and yet

this country still has to do it because a European Court has ruled that way?

And so this country should. You're forgetting that

I took the whole state to court, the whole state was found guilty

for a human rights abuse, by the highest court in Europe.

We signed up to abide by both the Convention

and the European Court decision.

We have an obligation, legally and morally, to abide by that

and we're not doing it.

So these MPs who are keep trying to wriggle their way off the hook,

they need to look at their selves, look at their consciences

and say, "Do I really believe in human rights?"

# I shot the sheriff.. #

I've got the...joint...

-I've got the bottle of champagne...

-After one particular victory in the case,

Mr Hirst posted this video of himself celebrating on YouTube.

CHAMPAGNE CORK POPS

Ha! Ha!

And I'm now going to celebrate for the 75,000 prisoners

who WILL be getting the vote.

That includes murderers, rapists, paedophiles, all of them will be

getting the vote because it's their human right to have the vote.

Cheers!

Oh, that's lovely.

HE INHALES DEEPLY

Ahhh!

# I shot the sheriff! #

When you won in Strasbourg, you posted a YouTube video.

For a lot of people that discredits human rights.

No, you're totally missing the point, right.

I was convicted of manslaughter. I won the human right to vote.

Now that's manslaughter before you start.

After my case, it was Vogel versus Austria,

in which a person was convicted of murder was told

he was entitled to the human right to vote, right.

Then you've got Greens

and MT versus UK, Greens is a rapist, MT's a paedophile

-Hold on a minute.

-I understand all these.

-Wait a minute let me.

No, you don't. Please let me finish the point.

So what you've got is a murderer, manslaughter, rapist,

paedophile, all told they've got a human right to vote.

How can you turn round and say that it is wrong?

The highest court in Europe

has stated that those categories can have the vote.

So the UK cannot turn round and say, "They can't have the vote."

The court said they can.

Let me repeat my question and see if,

if you would do me the favour of answering it?

But what I'm saying is you understand, when you see that human rights rulings

have allowed you to claim that it's now time for murderers,

rapists and paedophiles to celebrate, that that risks undermining

the very concept of human rights in a lot of ordinary people's eyes?

I refer you to the answer I just gave you a few moments ago.

Now if you can't accept the truth of an answer then I'm sorry. The reality

is the highest court in Europe has ruled that murderers, rapists,

people convicted of manslaughter are entitled to the human right to vote.

So my speaking out in favour of that is not undermining it at all.

-What is undermining it...

-I think Mr Hirst is engaging in some wishful thinking here.

-You can't use it?

-It is a simple answer but if you're too stupid to understand it.

That I may be.

But by ignoring Strasbourg's decision, the Government is in

-a very difficult position.

-You cannot go into Europe and not play ball.

-You have to play ball.

-OK. I think we'll leave it there.

THE PRISONER THEME PLAYS

In 2010, the European Court warned that it could start to award

compensation to prisoners who still didn't have the vote.

Unless the British Government complies, the court could tell it

to start writing cheques to prisoners in compensation.

Cheques to prisoners because of their human rights.

That'll go down well in the age of austerity.

Votes for prisoners, freedom for Abu Qatada - they've brought

Westminster to boiling point over human rights, even producing

loud calls for them to be scrapped outright.

ON THE BUSES THEME PLAYS

The sight of one of London's rare icons brings out

the romantic in most of us. Just ask Boris.

He got rid of those nasty German bendy buses,

saying we could rely on our own British tradition, a good old Routemaster.

A similar approach to the Tory MP leading the clamour

against Strasbourg, who thinks we can rely on British tradition

to preserve our human rights and have no need for any European import.

So what better vehicle to meet him in Westminster?

Hello, Mr Davies. Come and have a seat?

-Thank you.

-So you want to scrap all human rights laws?

I want to scrap the Human Rights Act

and I want to withdraw from the European Convention of Human Rights.

But our rights as British citizens are enshrined in history,

through Magna Carta, through the Bill of Rights,

through habeas corpus, through common law.

I don't want to scrap all of that I just want to scrap

the Human Rights Act and withdraw from the European Convention of Human Rights.

So you don't think we need the European Convention on Rights?

To look after our rights?

We don't. Our rights go way back way before the Human Rights Act and before the European Convention.

And you don't even feel that we need our right codified in,

in a British Human Rights Law?

No, I mean they were in the Bill of Rights, I guess,

in the 17th century but I think our laws are such that

we don't need to have a new British Bill of Rights or a Human Rights Act.

It's completely superfluous to requirements.

But if we pulled out of the Convention, we would be

categorised with Belarus in Europe, the only other country that isn't

part of it and Belarus is one of the world's nastiest dictatorships?

Is that who we want to be along side?

I'm not interested in which other countries are in the Human... the Convention of Human Rights

and which ones aren't in the Convention of Human Rights.

I'm interested in what we do in this country

and what's right for the public in this country and Belarus don't have

Magna Carta, they don't have habeas corpus, they don't have the

Bill of Rights in the 17th century, they don't have the same history we have.

So it's completely meaningless to look at

what other countries are doing because they don't have the same heritage that we do.

So is Philip Davies right?

Do we have laws in place already, Great British laws,

which protect our Human Rights?

OK. Clearly, there's a problem. From grieving parents to

disempowered politicians, from worried policemen even to

some human rights activists themselves, there's widespread concern

about the way human rights are working out in practice.

So say some, "Why bother with the Strasbourg Court or even the

"European Convention after all isn't Britain the home of Human Rights?

"Didn't we invent them?"

As every school boy used to know, the rights of every free born

Englishman and since the Act of Union, even Scotsmen like me,

are guaranteed by these words, Magna Carta.

Also known at the time as The Great Charter of English Liberties.

It was signed here in Runnymede by King John,

under duress in June 1215.

And it's true. Many of the great phrases in this charter

still echo down the ages.

"No free man should be seized or imprisoned,

"or stripped of his rights or possessions.

"Nor will we proceed against or prosecute except by

"the lawful judgment of his peers.

"To no-one will we sell or deny or delay a right of justice."

So you can see why some people say,

"If you've got the Magna Carta, what else do you need?"

Romantics see it as a list of rights that needs to be

protected from Strasbourg, albeit written in medieval Latin.

But was Magna Carta really a medieval Bill of Rights for the king's subjects?

What do you think is the popular perception of the Magna Carta?

We see it as being this founding document of British democracy.

We see it as this, this really seminal moment in

our island story and the problem is really kind of separating out that

myth from the reality of what Magna Carta actually amounts to now.

Some people in Britain say, "What, what need do we have of

"a European Convention on Human Rights? We have the Magna Carta, the original."

We do. The problem with that is that that document,

only about four clauses of it are now actually part of English law

and only one of those has actually any relevance to human rights,

this is chapter 29 and that's seen as protecting rights such as,

right to trial by jury,

freedom from arbitrary imprisonment, right to due process at law.

Now the problem with that with this is that even that chapter

when you look at how it operates in practice,

those rights often aren't upheld.

So we have Magna Carta, the 1689 Bill of Rights,

the glorious tradition of English common law but history tells us

that what Parliament gives, Parliament can take away

and it more than happy to overrule our rights whenever it suits.

If you look back through British history, you'll see that,

actually, Parliament's been able to override

Magna Carta rights on a number of occasions -

suspensions of habeas corpus in the 18th and 19th centuries,

meaning that the Government could actually imprison people

without charge and they were actually imprisoning people

who were agitating for democratic rights.

So they were actually kind of suppressing the will of the people.

-The very rights they were meant to be protecting.

-Yes.

-Yes, exactly.

-So what would you say to those who get

all misty-eyed here at Runnymede, that, we have our rights

in the Magna Carta, what need do we have of rights from Strasbourg?

I think what I'd say is that it's all very well getting misty-eyed

about what people think Magna Carta amounts to but what Magna Carta

-ACTUALLY amounts to in terms of British law is pretty much sweet FA!

-That bad?

-Yeah.

There you have it.

It's not as easy as the political romantics think.

You can't just tear up the Human Rights Act

and dust down the Magna Carta.

So I'm going to put on my best good Queen Bess act

and sail down the Thames to Parliament to see

if there is any way we can restore public trust in human rights laws.

Here's the dilemma.

We're not keen on being told what to do by foreign judges.

We're not even keen on British judges when they interpret

the Human Rights Act in ways that are uber-compliant with Strasbourg.

So do we need a solution that is modern but quintessentially British?

A sort of Kate Middleton or Daniel Craig of Human Rights Laws?

-Geoffrey Robertson certainly thinks so.

-I'll get my hair in place.

I did have a coffee coming but...

Now even this pillar of the liberal legal establishment

thinks it's time to have a British Bill of Rights.

A set of human rights laws specifically tailored

to our traditions.

What's wrong with the European Convention on Human Rights?

First thing, it's European.

It's not rooted in the British struggle, particularly the struggle

that gave this country before any other, abolition of torture,

parliamentary sovereignty, independence of the judges and so forth.

The second thing is that it's from 1950.

It was a wonder of its time but that time was 1950.

We need an updated Bill of Rights,

the European Convention is past its use by date, we've moved on.

We need better rights,

we need a Bill of Rights that people can relate to, this is our heritage

and by writing it down by a preamble, written not

by lawyers but by historians and poets, you would actually inspire people

-and explain why rights are important...

-That came out of our experience?

That can out of our experience.

On the surface the idea of a British Bill of Rights sounds attractive.

The Tories certainly think so. They've made it their official party policy

but it's also their policy to stay inside the European Convention.

They can't get round the fact that no matter how inspiring

or modern a British Bill of Rights was, it would still be subservient

to the European Convention and the Strasbourg Court.

And with the Strasbourg Court still in ultimate charge,

there would still be plenty to annoy us, prisoners would still get the vote,

we still couldn't deport Abu Qatada and we still couldn't expel

foreign criminals who run children down and leave them to die on the street.

Just why would we need to stay in Strasbourg

if we had our own British Bill of Rights?

I want to put that to the Government Minister responsible.

Can we just be clear that in the party scheme of things that

a British Bill of Rights would be in addition to,

not instead of the European Convention?

A British Bill of Rights must be compatible with adherence

with the Convention.

If it were not, then it would lead to constant difficulties

and cases going to Strasbourg in large numbers.

But it wouldn't replace the Convention that's my point?

It was never intended that it should replace the Convention.

I would have thought the consequences of pulling out of the Convention,

thereby undermining it as a document applying

right across the civilised areas of Europe would be very damaging to us.

It would be damaging to the development of human rights

in the countries, which need the Convention, particularly

to improve their standards and I think ultimately it would be

damaging to us because whatever short-term benefits

it might confer in terms of easing some of the debate, I don't think

it would actually, ultimately resolve all the questions.

If, as been suggested, we would still have

a national Bill of Rights, with incorporated the Convention but simply applied

it here, there would still inevitably be tensions with our own national courts

applying rights, which sometimes people would object to.

Not only would the Tories' British Bill of Rights still be subservient

to Strasbourg but it ain't gonna happen this side of an election.

The Lib Dems won't have it!

The only thing the Coalition can agree on is

pressing for reform of how the European Court works day to day.

Now is their big chance for change. Britain's currently

the head of the Council of Europe but only until May.

Ministers want more cases left to national courts with only

the most serious going to Strasbourg but all 47 member states will

need to agree and achieving that is like herding cats.

Does the Government really think it can deliver change?

What reforms will have been achieved by May?

By May, we'll have a declaration, a declaration,

which sets the course of the reforms that we need to take place.

It was never on the cards that within the six months,

suddenly there would be changes to the Convention.

So the actual changes won't take place?

We've had declarations before?

-Yes but those declarations.

-We've had them all.

So there will actually be no change have taken place

by the time we lose it?

But the declaration is quite an important thing

I understand that that it does lead many to suggest that major reform

is a distant pipe dream. It isn't going to happen.

No, it's not a pipe dream. There I disagree with you.

-But it's not going to happen?

-Well I think it's going to happen.

We're out of the driving seat in May, in comes Albania, then Andorra, not exactly great legal powers.

Looming on the horizon Azerbaijan, a well-know defender of human rights.

You can't maintain the momentum for reform with these countries?

I'm not sure I agree about that. I think that's a misunderstanding of the way the Council of Europe works.

If there is a widespread desire for this reform programme to be

taken forward, I don't see any reason why the momentum should be lost.

I doubt a statement of intent about reforming Strasbourg is

going to satisfy the clamour for fundamental change I've heard

loud and clear on my journey.

As a British-born subject who's proud to be British, is that

not what we stand for?

Certainly, to stand up against what is clearly wrong.

Who is running this country, the judges or the Government?

If the Government brings in legislation, where it puts the right

of the victim before the rights of the criminal, then I can say that

we've maybe made a Human Rights Act that is something we can genuinely

be proud of, as a nation and something that benefits everybody.

And then I can say something good's come from Amy's death.

There is one thing we could do,

which might just fulfil Paul's dream.

We could have a new Bill of Rights that includes all those

freedoms Churchill enshrined in the Convention

and adds other distinctly British rights like trial by jury.

But it would only amount to real change if we did it outside

the Strasbourg system and we resigned from the Convention.

If you don't like the way human rights have evolved under

Strasbourg's tender care, that's probably the most logical conclusion

and we could do it but it would come at a price.

Britain leaving would weaken the Convention.

We'd disappoint those who look to us to set an example and we'd be used by those,

with bad human rights records, as an excuse to ignore Strasbourg.

So there you have it.

We face a choice - to satisfy the growing domestic

clamour for change, you need to run the risk of becoming,

at least for a time, something of an international legal pariah.

And despite the public's disquiet about human rights,

most mainstream politicians on the left or the right,

simply aren't prepared to go that far.

Don't let the politicians or the judges or the lawyers

fudge the issue - it is a stark choice and one we have yet to face up to.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd