The president of the European Court of Human Rights avoided discussing the Bill of Rights with lord chancellor Dominic Raab after meeting him earlier this month, it was revealed yesterday. However Síofra O’Leary said the UK’s existing Human Rights Act is ‘doing a very good job’.
Answering a question at the ECHR’s annual press conference, Síofra O’Leary said she had ‘open and cordial’ and ‘useful exchange’ with Raab earlier this month. Raab spoke to her about the Bill of Rights and the ideas behind it, but she told him she could not engage in government or parliamentary policy as a serving judge.
O’Leary said the Human Rights Act, which the new bill would overturn, had led to ‘closer alignment between Strasbourg and the domestic courts’. This had ‘resulted in a reduction in the number of applications coming from the United Kingdom and the number of violations which are found in relation to the United Kingdom.’
The conference that heard 260 applications from the UK were lodged in 2022: 250 of those were struck out or declared inadmissible. In two cases, relating to three applications, a violation was found and no violation was found in two other cases.
O’Leary said: ‘In terms of a statistic that we use, and many of you will be familiar with this, we look at the number of applications per 10,000 inhabitants. According to that calculation the UK is the 46th position of the 46 states with 0.03. The only other two states which come close are Ireland and Germany with 0.07.’
She told the conference that when speaking to Raab she told him: ‘From a Strasbourg perspective, the Human Rights Act… appears to be doing a very good job. It is fit for purpose.’
She added: ‘It gives rise to case law in the United Kingdom given by UK courts who often engage rigorously, even critically, with our case law but who interpret and apply the convention.
‘The Human Rights Act, as I explained to him, embeds the convention within the domestic system and that allows us as judges in Strasbourg when dealing with UK cases to apply the principle of subsidiarity and the margin of appreciation in a particular way generally because the domestic judges have effectively done the job.’
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