Jack Straw: Why I agree that the ECHR and Strasbourg need reining in

There is a delicious irony that one of the principal midwives of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR), Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, was profoundly conservative, and later one of the most reactionary post-war Home Secretaries, leading opposition to the Wolfenden Inquiry’s proposal to decriminalise gay sex between consenting adults. Yet he played a central role in the fledgling Council of Europe, serving as rapporteur of the committee that drafted what became the ECHR, which came into force in 1953.

The apparent contradiction in Fyfe’s positions is less striking than it seems. The Convention was designed as a restatement of core liberties the British believed they already enjoyed, albeit uncodified and inchoate. Few on the left or right would quarrel with the Convention’s actual text. For many continental states, emerging from tyranny and occupation, its articles became a template for modern statements of rights. But the UK resisted incorporation for decades on a bipartisan basis. The argument was simple: we already had these rights, incorporation would be an unnecessary, continental import.

In early 1987, a courageous Conservative MP, Sir Edward Gardner QC, who had been my head of chambers at the Bar, introduced a Private Member’s Bill to incorporate the Convention into domestic law. It died immediately, opposed by both front benches.

It took the late John Smith and then Tony Blair to commit Labour to incorporation, and it fell to me, as Home Secretary, to work out how to do it.