EU Referendum


UK politics: the limits of power


24/01/2015



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Both the Guardian and the Mail are running prominent stories about collusion between Blair's government and Libya's Colonel Gaddafi, based on access to documents captured after the dictator's overthrow.

In particular, both papers are featuring Blair's "fawning letter" on official Downing Street-headed paper, dated 26 April 2007. In it, the former prime minister apologises for failing to send the tyrant's enemies back to Libya to face torture. Blair expressed then himself "very disappointed" that Britain's courts had blocked the deportation of five Libyan dissidents amid fears they would be mistreated.

On the basis of the court's decision, on 27 April, the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) blocked the deportation, saying a Memorandum of Understanding signed by Britain and Libya to safeguard the protection of returning dissidents was worthless.

Gaddafi, it said, was "unpredictable" and would ignore it. The Commission also expressed concern that a so-called independent board set up to monitor deportees' treatment was to be run by Gaddafi's son Saif and, therefore, there was a "real risk" of them being ill-treated, including being beaten, hung from hooks on the wall, shackled and given electric shocks.

The intriguing thing about this, though, is that Blair seems to have been blocked by the Human Rights Act 1998, which his own government introduced, giving force to the European Convention on Human Rights.

Arguably, there are few people who would have supported a clear breach of an international agreement, to the extent that our government knowingly deported political dissidents to a country where they faced almost certain torture and possibly death.

But in this case, it would seem that the only barrier preventing that had been the Human Rights Act, which Mr Cameron has promised to repeal, and many campaigners are keen to see removed, in order to prevent the courts interfering with the sovereign rights of our elected government.

And therein lies a troubling conundrum. If we cannot trust our own government to refrain from perpetrating obvious human rights abuses, then we need a "higher power" with the ability to intervene, to block such actions.

Thus, repealing the Human Rights Act – and pulling out of the European Convention on Human Rights – could prove a dangerous move, if the result is a prime minister (and his executive) with untrammelled power. It seems to me that we would still need a powerful, independent judicial system to protect us from abuse.

And when the court system fails – as it so often does – what then? At the moment, we have the longstop of the court in Strasbourg. And if we repudiate that, what do we replace it with? Elections are not sufficient protection - Blair was an elected prime minister.

Methinks, we would need our own, written constitution, and our own Supreme Court to enforce it. And that, at the moment, is not on the cards, making the idea of dumping the HRA akin to leaping from the frying pan into the fire. Whether elected or not, there must be a limit to executive power and a means to enforce that limit.