Poll: The official I voted/election results thread

[Skunkworks]

There's also been plenty of more agreeable victories too. They just don't tend to get reported in the tabloid press.

It's true that the abuses are always easier to find, but are there examples of positive outcomes that likely wouldn't have happened pre-HRA?

 

[Tunney]

I'll dig out some examples when I'm not on my phone. The UK courts are only overruled a handful of times a year. The UK government has a very good win-rate.

Just remember that part of the reason why the HRA was drawn up was to ensure that 99.9% of cases could be heard quickly and in UK courts.

Consider an immigration case. Before the HRA, the case would have gone directly to Strasbourg. Strasbourg is incredibly oversubscribed (Russia takes up a lot of its time!) and cases can take over ten years to be heard. Ten years is longer than the immigrate needs to become naturalised in the UK and therefore impossible to remove.

 

[Skunkworks]

Thanks.

I must admit to not knowing much about it, so my questions are genuine.

 

[Tunney]

This website seems to contain a lot of positive stories around the rights of the disabled, elderly and children.

e.g.:

Keeping elderly couples together

Mr V contacted Counsel and Care when social services threatened to move his wife into a care home which was some distance from the family. Mrs V has Alzheimer’s and is blind. Mrs V had temporarily moved into a local nursing home after being hurt in a fall. Mr V was also injured in the fall, and unable to care for his wife at home. Social services decided Mrs V should be moved to a permanent care home but Mr V disagreed with the home social services chose, because it was too far for him and other family members to travel to see Mrs V. Counsel and Care helped Mr V to challenge this decision, by providing information on community care laws, and combining this with the argument that social services needed to consider Mr V's right to private and family life under the HRA (Article 8). This helped Mr V persuade social services to allow Mrs V to remain in the nursing home close to her family

 

[scorza]

So you're primarily against it because of cost?

As stated in the article, the HRA actually saved the taxpayer a lot of money as fewer cases are referred to Strasbourg. A lot of immigration cases were taking over ten years to resolve before the HRA.

Also, money-driven lawyers don't do human rights cases. The rates are significantly lower than for commercial work and most human rights lawyers do a lot of pro bono cases.

I'm primarily against it because of diminishes the country's ability to defend itself and its citizens. When you hear about cases when a foreign criminal's right to family life is deemed important enough to not deport them after their sentence has been served then you know the law favours the criminals and not the victims.

Phil Shiner and Gareth Pierce both always seem to do quite well from taxpayer's cash.

 

[Jono8]

Is there any empirical evidence that suicide amongst those on welfare has gone up since 2010?

I see lots of anecdotal stories in the Mirror and Guardian but unless you believe that prior to the Tories getting in last time there were no suicides amongst the poor and vulnerable then all we have is a correlation versus causation thing.

Be right back, got to look this up whilst sitting in a Starbucks on my Samsung Galaxy Phone, using google and Facebook, whilst wearing my designer clothes

 

[DampDog]

Oh dear, looks like the wheels are coming off the bus already..

Douglas Carswell

 

[Mynight]

I suggest they take it and devote the lot to weeding out the undesirables from their party for the next round.

 

[Tunney]

Oh dear, looks like the wheels are coming off the bus already..

Douglas Carswell

Good to see a politician stand up for his principles. I thought his victory speech after he won his consistency was also excellent.

 

[DampDog]

Good to see a politician stand up for his principles.

Unfortunately I don't think the parliamentary/political system is geared to 'men/women' of principal. The system soon whips them into shape, regardless of party and being as morally bankrupt and self serving as the rest is the only way to survive inside the gates of Westminster. "the honourable gentleman" as about as far away from the truth as you'll every get for the majority of them. Rant over, I'll get me coat...

 

[scorza]

http://www.theguardian.com/law/2015/may/12/scottish-government-human-rights-act-conservatives

The Scottish government has said that it will withhold legislative consent on the Conservative proposals to scrap the 1998 Human Rights Act, as it emerged that the SNP has already had informal discussions with Tory backbenchers who oppose the move.

The social justice secretary, Alex Neil, told the Holyrood chamber on Tuesday afternoon: “The Scottish government’s position is that implementation of the Conservative government’s proposals would require legislative consent and that this parliament should make clear that such consent will not be given.”

The ****** brass neck on the Scots. This is why we need to scrap the HRA - we need to make sure that Westminster runs Britain not Holyrood, otherwise Cameron is just in Alec Salmond's pocket.

 

[Deleted member 66701]

Here's a few examples:

• Strasbourg’s 2006 finding that axe-killer John Hirst and thousands of other convicts should be entitled to vote in UK elections. Ministers have since fought an ongoing battle to avoid implementing the judgment – which David Cameron says makes him feel physically sick.
• Al Qaeda fanatic Abu Qatada was awarded £2,500 for being ‘unlawfully detained’, after being held indefinitely without trial following September 11. Then the Euro court said he should not be sent back to Jordan in case some of the evidence used against him may have come from torture. Qatada eventually left his benefits-funded life in north-west London voluntarily after Theresa May doggedly pursued him.
• Aso Mohammed Ibrahim left 12-year-old Amy Houston to die ‘like a dog’ under the wheels of his car after knocking her down in 2003 while disqualified from driving. Twice refused asylum, the Iraqi was never removed from the country by the Home Office and then, after the killing, was allowed to stay under the Human Rights Act because he had fathered two children in Britain, which judges ruled gave him a right to a ‘family life’.
• A Libyan convicted of 78 offences escaped deportation last month on the grounds he is an alcoholic. The 53-year-old man, who is protected by an anonymity order, successfully argued he would be tortured and imprisoned by the authorities in his homeland because drinking alcohol is illegal. He is now free to continue his drink-fuelled offending spree in Britain.
• In December 2013, Mustafa Abdullahi, who held a knife to a pregnant woman’s throat as he raped her, was given permission to stay in Britain, because of his family rights. The 31-year-old failed asylum seeker was jailed for ten years after he threatened to kill his victim and repeatedly assaulted her. Judges said sending him back to Somalia would breach his family rights because his mother and other relatives live in the UK.
• Rupert Massey is one of many criminals to view the convention as a tool for lining his pockets. Jailed for six years for sexually abusing three boys, he claimed the four years it took to bring him to court had left him ‘stressed’ and infringed his right to a fair trial. He was awarded nearly £6,000 – the same amount in compensation given to one of his victims.
• Rapist Akindoyin Akinshipe escaped deportation in September 2011 after judges said he had a right to a ‘private life’ in the UK. He was due to be sent to Nigeria after losing a series of appeals in Britain over his jailing for an attack on a girl of 13 when he was 15. But Strasbourg overruled, despite him not having a long-term partner or children in the UK.
• George Blake was jailed for 42 years, one for each of the MI6 agents he sent to their deaths. The Soviet spy escaped from Wormwood Scrubs and wrote his memoirs in Russia. Incredibly, he was given £4,700 by Strasbourg in 2006 because Britain breached his right to free expression by trying to stop him making money from the book.
• Lawyers for drug-addicted prisoners spotted the convention’s money-making potential – forcing the Home Office to settle out of court over claims their clients should have been allowed to use heroin substitute methadone.
• The Labour government paid out £1million after being told Strasbourg would have ruled making the convicts go ‘cold turkey’ was degrading treatment.
• Jailed murderer Kirk Dickson spent £20,000 in legal aid winning the right to father children with artificial insemination with another former prisoner, fraudster Lorraine Earlie. Judges said the ban on prisoners using artificial insemination breached the right to family life.
• Britain’s power to send foreign criminals home was hampered by the 1996 Strasbourg ruling over Karamjit Chahal, a separatist who was wanted for sedition in India. He argued that, even if somebody posed a grave threat to national security, they could not be sent back to a country where they might be ill treated. Since then, thousands of convicts and fanatics have been able to stay on these grounds.
• Centuries-old rules outlawing marriage between children and their parents-in-law were swept aside in a 2005 ruling. Strasbourg deemed the right to marry was infringed in the case of a 37-year-old woman who wanted to wed her 58-year-old father-in-law.
• William Danga, who raped and molested two girls while fighting deportation, used Article 8 of the HRA to remain in this country. The Congolese asylum seeker was jailed for ten years for raping a 16-year-old. He used his children to stay in Britain and attacked two other children after his release from prison.
• There remains public outrage that Euro judges ruled three IRA terrorists shot dead by the SAS in Gibraltar in 1988 were wrongly killed. This was despite the fact the trio were an experienced hit squad with long terror records who had left a car filled with explosives across the border in Spain. The SAS soldiers believed they were ready to detonate the bomb, but it turned out their mission was reconnaissance.

Sorry it's all negative but that's because the HRA hasn't really done much positive stuff (that wouldn't have been done anyway, because contrary to some leftist views we were not eating and raping each other in the street prior to 1998)

Do you get the Daily Mail delivered?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...Rights-Act-JAMES-SLACK-offers-15-reasons.html

As for HRA successes, you don't have to look very far:-

• [*]1: Protecting us at our most vulnerable
  Mr and Mrs Driscoll had lived together for over 65 years. Unable to walk unaided, Mr Driscoll relied on his wife to help him move around. She was blind and relied on her husband as her eyes. When Mr Driscoll was moved into a residential care home, Mrs Driscoll wanted to move to the home with her husband but was told she didn’t meet the criteria.
  
  ‘We have never been separated in all our years and for it to happen now, when we need each other so much, is so upsetting. I am lost without him – we were a partnership’.
  Mrs Driscoll
  
  This was a clear breach of the couple's right to a family life as protected by the Human Rights Act, and a public campaign was launched to encourage social services to think again. As a result, Mrs Driscoll’s needs were re-assessed and the couple were reunited – setting a precedent for elderly couples to be kept together in the same care home.
  
  [*]2. Protecting women from domestic violence and keeping their families together
  The obligations in the Human Rights Act helped a woman and her children find a safe home after leaving an abusive husband. Her husband had kept tracking them down, forcing them to move again and again.
  
  When she arrived in London the local social services department told her she was an unfit parent because she was making the family intentionally homeless by moving without justification and her children would be taken into foster care. With help from an advice worker, she argued the department was violating her rights under the Human Rights Act. At that point, they agreed – and the family stayed together.
  
  [*]3. Making it safer to be gay
  Today, being gay could get you arrested or even executed in at least 78 countries. Thanks in large part to the ECHR and the Human Rights Act in the UK, our rights to be treated as equals with equal access to protection regardless of gender, sexuality, race or age are protected by law. The fight for equal rights has been significantly advanced by the laws.
  
  Right up until 1982, ‘male homosexual acts’ were a crime in Northern Ireland. It was finally decriminalised following a human rights case brought forward by Jeff Dudgeon, a gay rights activist from Belfast.
  
  In another landmark case in 2000, the Army was found to have violated the rights of two British servicemen by dismissing them for being gay. This momentous case lead to a change in UK law to allow gay members of the armed forces to be open about their sexuality.
  
  [*]4. Confirming that innocent means innocent
  In 2008 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the UK was violating an individual’s right to privacy by holding fingerprint and DNA information of people who hadn’t been charged or convicted of a crime - they said retaining the information ‘could not be regarded as necessary in a democratic society’.
  
  At the time, nearly one million innocent people had their DNA or fingerprints on the database, a fifth of the total database. As it swelled so did the concern that police were building a database of ‘presumed guilt’. Beforehand, the UK Law Lords had defended the police’s right to hold our personal information in this way - it took a European Court judgement for common sense to prevail.

Lots of other examples, but I can't be bothered listing them as I know full well you'll just dismiss the above as lefty nonsense.

 

[Deleted member 66701]

Isn't it premature to start saying we're all going to lose loads of rights/criticise what's coming, when we haven't yet seen the proposals?

Is this not enough to make your mind up?

http://www.theguardian.com/politics.../conservatives-human-rights-act-full-document

 

[Bear]

Did you really just gave a go at him saying he's a daily mail reader, yet you quote a daily mail article to back up your point? Jesus wept.

 

[Deleted member 66701]

Did you really just gave a go at him saying he's a daily mail reader, yet you quote a daily mail article to back up your point? Jesus wept.

You fail at reading comprehension.

I linked the Daily Mail article his info had been linked from.

It'd be idiotic to make a decision based on that. So... no.

As much as I hate strawmen, that's like saying "Dave said he's going to kill me, but as I don't know his weapon of choice I'll hold judgement for now".

The intent is clear enough.

 

[estebanrey]

As for HRA successes, you don't have to look very far:-

1: Protecting us at our most vulnerable
Mr and Mrs Driscoll had lived together for over 65 years. Unable to walk unaided, Mr Driscoll relied on his wife to help him move around. She was blind and relied on her husband as her eyes. When Mr Driscoll was moved into a residential care home, Mrs Driscoll wanted to move to the home with her husband but was told she didn’t meet the criteria.

‘We have never been separated in all our years and for it to happen now, when we need each other so much, is so upsetting. I am lost without him – we were a partnership’.
Mrs Driscoll

This was a clear breach of the couple's right to a family life as protected by the Human Rights Act, and a public campaign was launched to encourage social services to think again. As a result, Mrs Driscoll’s needs were re-assessed and the couple were reunited – setting a precedent for elderly couples to be kept together in the same care home.

This change in decision seems to be more about the Public Campaign (causing bad PR for the nursing home) than it does about the HRA.

2. Protecting women from domestic violence and keeping their families together
The obligations in the Human Rights Act helped a woman and her children find a safe home after leaving an abusive husband. Her husband had kept tracking them down, forcing them to move again and again.

When she arrived in London the local social services department told her she was an unfit parent because she was making the family intentionally homeless by moving without justification and her children would be taken into foster care. With help from an advice worker, she argued the department was violating her rights under the Human Rights Act. At that point, they agreed – and the family stayed together.

The HRA also entitles the abusive husband a "right to a family life" too and could also be used by him to block any restrictions stopping him from seeing his children.

3. Making it safer to be gay
Today, being gay could get you arrested or even executed in at least 78 countries. Thanks in large part to the ECHR and the Human Rights Act in the UK, our rights to be treated as equals with equal access to protection regardless of gender, sexuality, race or age are protected by law. The fight for equal rights has been significantly advanced by the laws.

Right up until 1982, ‘male homosexual acts’ were a crime in Northern Ireland. It was finally decriminalised following a human rights case brought forward by Jeff Dudgeon, a gay rights activist from Belfast.

In another landmark case in 2000, the Army was found to have violated the rights of two British servicemen by dismissing them for being gay. This momentous case lead to a change in UK law to allow gay members of the armed forces to be open about their sexuality.

Yet this 'evil' Tory government passed Gay Marriage last term when no HRA article compelled them to do so.

4. Confirming that innocent means innocent
In 2008 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the UK was violating an individual’s right to privacy by holding fingerprint and DNA information of people who hadn’t been charged or convicted of a crime - they said retaining the information ‘could not be regarded as necessary in a democratic society’.

At the time, nearly one million innocent people had their DNA or fingerprints on the database, a fifth of the total database. As it swelled so did the concern that police were building a database of ‘presumed guilt’. Beforehand, the UK Law Lords had defended the police’s right to hold our personal information in this way - it took a European Court judgement for common sense to prevail..

Only we don't prove people "innocent" do we? They are judged to be not guilty and whilst sometimes that does mean there were innocent, other times it means there wasn't enough evidence or that had the best lawyer money can buy. Some of the "one million innocent people" you cite didn't even get to court so weren't judged either way.

Whether the police keep finger print records isn't something I'll lose sleep over and whilst sure I feel for people who are completely innocent having details their peers don't have on record, I don't think that 'annoyance' outweighs the pain and suffering of families who are victims of criminals that go unpunished because the police no longer have the ability to cross match the finger prints they found with the perpetrator who was arrested a few years earlier but luckily got the charges dropped on that occasion.

 

[George Hincapie]

The HRA also entitles the abusive husband a "right to a family life" too and could also be used by him to block any restrictions stopping him from seeing his children.

Why should he be stopped from seeing his children? What a bizarre statement.

 

[estebanrey]

Why should he be stopped from seeing his children? What a bizarre statement.

I don't think you follow, the HRA was being lauded as a great piece of legislation helping women get away from abusive husbands, when in fact he could use it to prevent them from moving away or doing anything that would severe contact.

But if you really need me to explain why a mother who's spent the last decade being beaten to a pulp by her husband may not want that same man having an influence in bringing up their child then I feel for you.

 

[MrMoonX]

I don't think you follow, the HRA was being lauded as a great piece of legislation helping women get away from abusive husbands, when in fact he could use it to prevent them from moving away or doing anything that would severe contact.

But if you really need me to explain why a mother who's spent the last decade being beaten to a pulp by her husband may not want that same man having an influence in bringing up their child then I feel for you.

That's ridiculous you clearly don't understand the HRA or know what you are talking about!

I've prepared many a court report balancing the rights of the father under article 8, to the rights of the children to be protected from violence, it's not up to the mother it's the child's welfare which is paramount. Many of these such cases end up with supervised contact.

Even an abusive husband has parental responsibility for his children under the children act, 1989 & 2004

 

[Deleted member 66701]

The HRA also entitles the abusive husband a "right to a family life" too and could also be used by him to block any restrictions stopping him from seeing his children.

Show me case law where this has happened, because I think you're just making it up / using conjecture to argue your point.