Call to scrap the Human Rights Act

Home Secretary Theresa May, has called for the Human Rights Act to be scrapped. Her interview with the Telegraph newspaper on the Third of  October  is nicely timed to coincide with the start of the Conservative Party Conference  this week and is bound to upset its  Liberal Democrat Coalition partner which, during its recent Party conference announced that the Act was here to stay.  The Human Rights Act though, will not be scrapped even under Conservative government.  It has been with us for so long now it is part of our heritage;and, it is not as though the act was conferring rights of persecution, tyranny, or mayhem. It is meant to provide protection from these things for the most vulnerable. Whether or not it succeeds in this and whether or not it can be improved is open to debate. That it is open to abuse is what seems to be  the driver of calls for it to be scrapped. But let's not throw out the baby with the bath water. To scrap it and replace it with a specifically British Act will, I suspect still provide loopholes for clever lawyers and immoral claimants. People who do not understand, or lack a sense of the spirit in which something is devised will always use the 'letter of the law' so to speak, to advance their own interests. So, it seems to me that what is needed is a reappraisal of the way the act is understood and why it came into existence.

 Take the Right of Family Life for instance, which seems to be  causing most consternation presently. Like many other Articles of the Act it came about from the experiences of the Second World War and in particular, the war waged against minority civilian groups for no other reason than their race or ethnicity. Bans on marriage between certain groups of people, sterilisation e.t.c. forced population transfers, all combined to destroy families and to make that most personal of decisions, who to marry, how many children, how to raise them, subject to political ideology based on a set of race laws. Who would not want to protect people from this.?

However, interpretation of this Act seems now to be extended with success, to protect the family life of non British Nationals who are, not only not subject to any kind  government tyranny, but are themselves criminals and have wrought a tyranny of a sorts on their victims and their families. Apparently it isn't always possible to deport non- national criminals because it would mean the break-up of his or her family life. This seems  about as far from the intention of the framers of the Act as you could possibly get. The Act does not provide for an absolute right, no rights are absolute, they are always conditional on you not having caused or contributed to your situation. Every day people are separated from their families and  sent to prison. Not because of who or what they are but because of what they have done.We have to be able to discriminate between those who fit the terms of the Act  i.e the innocent, and those who are not. And as long as the break-up of a person's family is a consequence of the person's own illegal actions and the rules on deportation are followed correctly then we have not only a right to deport but also a duty. If we do not, we risk watering down the Act so much that we kill the spirit of it. Once we do that it simply becomes a vehicle for criminals to avoid justice in the pursuit of personal gain. I for one would not want that to be our legacy to all those who suffered for the Act to be needed in the first place. Let us pay them, and the Act a little more respect