David

Cameron

Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech made to the Assembly

Wednesday, 25 January 2012

All speechesQuestions and answers

Thank you for that kind and generous introduction.

Once in a generation, each member state has the honour of leading the Council of Europe and today I want to speak about the once-in-a-generation chance that we have, together, to improve the way we enhance the causes of human rights, of freedom and of dignity. We have an ambitious agenda for the coming months – to reinforce local democracy, to combat discrimination, and to strengthen the rule of law across Europe – but, as you know, the focus of our chairmanship is our joint effort to reform the European Court of Human Rights.

The role of the Court has never been more challenging. As the Council has expanded, more and more people have applied to seek justice. We need to work together to ensure that, throughout these changes, the Court remains true to its original intention: to uphold the Convention and to prevent the abuse of human rights. So today I want to explain why I believe the Court needs reform and set out some of the proposals that are on the table.

First, I want to make something clear: human rights is a cause that runs deep in the British heart and long in British history. In the 13th century, Magna Carta set down specific rights for citizens, including the right to freedom from unlawful detention. In the 17th century in Britain, the Petition of Right gave new authority to Parliament and the Bill of Rights set limits on the power of the monarchy. By the 18th century, it was said that this spirit of liberty was so deeply implanted in our constitution and rooted in our very soil that a slave, the moment he landed in England, falls under the protection of the laws and, with regard to all natural rights, instantly became a free man. It was that spirit that led to the abolition of slavery, that drove the battle against tyranny in two world wars, and that inspired Winston Churchill to promise that the end of the world struggle would see the enthronement of human rights. As he put it, victory in that war was the victory of an ideal founded on the right of the common man, on the dignity of the human being and on the conception of the state as servant, not master, of its people. These beliefs have animated the British people for centuries, and they still animate us today.

When the Arab Spring erupted, the United Kingdom was a principal supporter of resolutions at the United Nations Human Rights Council. We are leading, with European Union partners, efforts to maintain the pressure on Syria. We played a key role in securing European Union sanctions against Iran. Through the United Nations, we are working to empower women in Afghanistan, Iraq and throughout the Middle East. We have pledged additional money to the Special Fund of the Optional Protocol to the United Nations Convention against Torture, and we are contributing to the Council of Europe’s own Human Rights Trust Fund. All these are clear signals of our belief in fundamental human rights, and if called to defend that belief, not just with words, but with action, we act. When the people of Libya were reaching for the chance to shape their own destiny, Britain stepped forward, with our allies, to help. Visiting Tripoli a few months ago and seeing the crowds of people jubilant and free, I was reminded of something that Margaret Thatcher once said: “The spirit of freedom is too strong to be crushed by the tanks of tyrants.” It is our hope that this spirit of freedom spreads further, and we will continue to support those reaching for it across the Arab world.

We are not, and never will be, a country that walks on by while human rights are trampled into the dust. This has a lot to do with Britain’s national character – a love of freedom, an instinctive loathing of over-mighty authority – but it is also about our national interest: to live, to travel, to trade in a more open and secure world. When a government respects its citizens’ human rights, it makes for a more stable country, and that is good for all of us. It was that great champion of freedom, Václav Havel, who put it best: “Without free, self-respecting and autonomous citizens there can be no free and independent nations. Without internal peace, that is, peace among citizens and between the citizens and the State, there can be no guarantee of external peace.” In other words, a commitment to human rights is both morally right and strategically right.

I want no one here to doubt, therefore, the British commitment to defending human rights. Nor do I want anyone to doubt the British understanding that the Council of Europe, the Convention and the Court have played a vital role in upholding those rights. But believing those things does not mean sticking to the status quo. As we are agreed, the time is right to ask some serious questions about how the Court is working.

More than 60 years ago, the Convention was drafted with some very clear intentions. It was born on a continent reeling from totalitarian rule. It was shocked by the brutality of the Holocaust and sickened by man’s inhumanity to man. Its purpose was clear: to spread across our continent respect for fundamental human rights, including the right to life, liberty and the integrity of the person. And it has achieved some vital things over the decades: from exposing torture to winning victories against degrading treatment in police custody and holding heavy-handed States to account. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it has played a major role in strengthening democracy across central and eastern Europe.

Furthermore, we should remember that oppression and brutality are not just facts about Europe’s past; as we sit here today, people in Belarus are being thrown into prison for their political beliefs and dissidents’ voices are being silenced and their rights crushed. What is happening less than 1 000 miles from here underlines the continuing importance and relevance of the Council of Europe, the Convention and the Court. It reminds us that now, more than ever, we need a Court that is a beacon for the cause of human rights, ruthlessly focused on defending human freedom and dignity, and respected across the continent and the world.

In that spirit, I have come to speak to you today. Today, the ability of the Court to play that vital role is under threat. As I see it, there are three interlinking issues that should cause us concern. First, the Court is being compelled to do too much, and that threatens its ability to do that which is most important. We have seen a massive increase in the number of cases. In the first 40 years of its existence, 45 000 cases were presented to the Court. In 2010 alone, 61 300 applications were presented. That has created, and goes on creating, a huge backlog – it was more than 160 000 at its peak. There can still be a delay of years before cases are heard, which means that tens of thousands of people have their lives put on hold. Those cases will inevitably include some of the most serious cases – cases of detention, torture and people who have had their fundamental rights denied.

Let me be clear: impressive steps are already being taken to filter out inadmissible cases more quickly. The Court should be congratulated on that. But a new problem is emerging. More and more of the backlog now comprises admissible cases that, according to current criteria, should be heard in full. Again, the Court is doing good work to deal with that. A system to prioritise the most important cases is in place, but the sheer volume risks urgent cases getting stuck in the queue. That means that the very purpose of the Court – to prevent the most serious violations of human rights – is under threat.

The flood of cases is linked to the second issue. The Court is properly safeguarding the right of individual petition, and that is a principle to which the United Kingdom is committed, but with that comes the risk of turning the Court into a court of the fourth instance, because there will already have been a first hearing in a court, a second hearing in an appeal court, and a third in a supreme or constitutional court. In effect, that gives an extra bite at the cherry to anyone who is dissatisfied with a domestic ruling, even when that judgment is reasonable, well founded and in line with the Convention.

Quite simply, the Court must be able to protect itself against spurious cases that have been dealt with at the national level. A good start has been made with Protocol No. 14, which makes it clear that cases are not admissible where there is no significant disadvantage to the applicant. The initial case in which that protocol has been used shows exactly what I mean. The applicant, in this case, took a bus company to court for €90 compensation because they felt that their journey from Bucharest to Madrid had not been as comfortable as advertised. One of the matters at issue was that the bus company did not provide fully reclining seats. Now, the domestic courts had turned him down, and he was taking the case to the Court. I think we can all agree that fully reclining seats would be most desirable on a trip from Bucharest to Madrid, but I think that we can also agree that it was a completely trivial case, and not the kind of case that should be heard here. The Court agreed with that, and rightly rejected the claim. That case underlines how important it is for the Court to have consistent power to control the cases that it admits.

I come to the third issue. The Court is, quite rightly, determined to ensure that consistent standards of rights are upheld across the 47 member States, but at times it has felt to us in national governments that what is called the margin of appreciation, which allows different interpretations of the Convention, has shrunk, and that not enough account is being taken of democratic decisions of national parliaments. I think that we should be frank about the fallout from this issue. As the margin of appreciation has shrunk, so the controversy has grown.

You will know that in the United Kingdom there is a lively debate about how human rights law works and how our national courts interact with Europe. Yes, some of this is misinterpretation, but some of this is credible democratic anxiety, as with the prisoner voting issue. I completely understand the Court’s belief that a national decision must be properly made, but in the end I believe that when such an issue has been subjected to proper, reasoned, democratic debate and has met with detailed scrutiny by national courts in line with the Convention, the decision should be treated with respect.

Another example of this issue – and one, I suspect, on which we can all agree – is the area of immigration. At Izmir, we collectively invited the Court to avoid intervening except in the most exceptional cases. All States agreed that the Court was, in some cases, too ready to substitute its judgments for those of reasonable national processes, and all agreed at Izmir that that was not the role of the Court. In other words, the Court should not see itself as an immigration tribunal.

Linked to that is the issue of terrorism. Protecting a country from terrorism is one of the most important tasks of any government. Again, no one should argue – I would never argue – that we defend our system of rights and freedoms by suspending those rights and freedoms, but we have a real problem when it comes to foreign nationals who threaten our security. In Britain, we have gone through all reasonable national processes, including painstaking international agreements on how they should be treated and scrutiny by our own courts, yet we are still unable to deport them.

It is not, therefore, that some people start asking questions about whether the current arrangements are sensible – of course, no decent country should deport people if they were to be tortured – but the problem today is that we can end up with someone who has no right to live in your country, whom you are convinced, and have good reason to be convinced, means to do your country harm, yet there are circumstances in which you cannot try them, detain them or deport them.

So having put in place every possible safeguard to ensure that the European Convention on Human Rights is not violated, we still cannot fulfil our duty to law-abiding citizens to protect them. Together, we have to find a solution to that. These concerns are shared by many member States, and at their heart is not antipathy to human rights, but anxiety that the concept of human rights is in danger of being distorted. As a result, for too many people the very concept of rights is in danger of slipping from something noble to something that can become discredited, and that should be of great concern to us all.

Upholding and promoting human rights is not something that governments and the Court can do alone – it is something that we need all our societies to be engaged with. When controversial rulings overshadow the good and patient long-term work that has been done, that not only fails to do justice to the work of the Court but has a corrosive effect on people’s support for human rights. The Court cannot afford to lose the confidence of the people of Europe.

Taken together, these issues threaten to shift the role of the Court away from its key objectives. The Court should be free to deal with the most serious violations of human rights. It should not be swamped with an endless backlog of cases. The Court should ensure that the right to individual petition counts, but it should not act as a small claims court.

The Court should hold us all to account; it should not undermine its own reputation by going over national decisions where it does not need to. For the sake of the 800 million people the Court serves, we need to reform it so that it is true to its original purpose. Already, 47 members are agreed on this, and great work has been done. We would like to use the chairmanship to progress that work. This is the right moment for reforms – reforms that are practical, sensible and that will, we believe, enhance the reputation of the Court.

We are looking to improve the efficiency of the Court; new rules could enable it to focus more efficiently and transparently on the most important cases. We ought to improve the procedures for nominating judges. The Assembly needs consistently strong shortlists from which to elect judges, and clear guidelines on national selection procedures could help with that. We are hoping to get consensus on strengthening subsidiarity, the principle that, where possible, final decisions should be made nationally.

It is, of course, correct that the Court should hold governments to account where they fail to protect human rights. In these instances, of course it is right for the Court to intervene, but what we are all striving for is that national governments should take primary responsibility for safeguarding their citizens’ rights, and that they should do that well. Subsidiarity is a fundamental principle of the convention, and at Izmir we were all clear that more needed to be done to give it practical effect. For that reason, we will shortly set out our proposals for pushing responsibility to the national system. In that way, we can free up the Court to concentrate on the worst, the most flagrant, human rights violations, and to challenge national courts when they clearly have not followed the Convention.

Of course, rebalancing this relationship is a two-way street. The other side of the deal is that members must get better at implementing the Convention at national level. That is why in the United Kingdom we are investigating the case for a Bill of Rights, and thoroughly examining the way in which our liberties are protected. Parliaments also have a key role and we are proud of the role that our Joint Committee on Human Rights plays. Of course, this Assembly makes a vital contribution, helping States to honour their obligations. Together, through these institutions, we can reduce the number of violations and ultimately ease the burden on the Court.

Let me finish by saying this: with this chairmanship we have a clear opportunity to agree a practical programme of reform. It should be built on the noble intentions of the Convention and it should be forged through consensus. It should be driven by a belief in fundamental human rights and a passion to advance them. This is undoubtedly a challenge, but I believe that it is a challenge we can meet together. Thank you.