Withdraw call over EU rights court

The centre-right Policy Exchange called for the UK to open negotiations over the efficiency of the Strasbourg court and the “judicial competence” of its judges.

Failure to achieve substantial progress within two years should lead Britain to pull out and allow the Supreme Court to adjudicate on human rights cases, it said.

The call, in a report published today, comes as the Government is wrestling with a ruling from the Strasbourg court that prisoners must be granted the vote.

The highly controversial issue will come to a head in the House of Commons on Thursday when MPs will debate and vote on the issue.

Prime Minister David Cameron has said that giving prisoners the vote makes him feel “physically ill” but the Government must act or it will face compensation claims from inmates adding up to more than £100m.

The Policy Exchange’s recommendations are endorsed by former law lord Lord Hoffmann, who wrote in the foreword to the report that seeking to repatriate human rights law was “worth a try”.

“International institutions which are set up by everyone become in practice answerable to no one, and courts have an age-old tendency to try to enlarge their jurisdictions,” he said.

“And so the Strasbourg court had taken upon itself an extraordinary power to micromanage the legal systems of the member states of the Council of Europe (or at any rate those which pay attention to its decisions) culminating, for the moment, in its decision that the UK is not entitled to have a law that convicted prisoners lose, among other freedoms, the right to vote.”

The Policy Exchange report, written by Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, recommended that the UK should open negotiations with the Council of Europe to make “substantial reforms to the way that the court is run and its caseload managed”.