Acceso usuarios
David Feldman
The Labour Party in the 1990s supported enactment of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) rights for party-political as well as principled reasons. The Human Rights Bill sought to balance parliamentary sovereignty and effective protection of rights, relying on both legal and political remedies for victims of violations. Whilst the potentially major constitutional and legal effects of the bill, which made it highly controversial from the start in the press, were partly hidden by highly-technical drafting, members of both Houses were fully aware of the scale of the bill's implications. Scrutiny was particularly rigorous in relation to the effect of decisions of the European Commission and Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg on domestic courts especially in the light of the Strasbourg organs' view of the ECHR as an evolving instrument, the position of particular interest groups such as journalistic and religious organisations, domestic courts' new obligation to interpret legislation so far as possible compatibly with the rights and their power to make a declaration of incompatibility should that prove impossible, and parliamentary scrutiny of legislation to remedy incompatibilities. Some worries have proved well founded, and political controversy has not diminished since 1998, partly because of heightened concern with measures to combat terrorism since 2001.
