Human rights

S Beck (Letters, 21 May) is correct. It was misleading of Allan Massie (Perspective, 20 May) to imply that the great Anglo-American Churchill and great Scot Maxwell Fyfe would not disapprove of how their creation, the European Convention on Human Rights, has been distorted in its current application by Strasbourg Court judges (some from recently Iron Curtain countries) with no appreciation of our common law traditions.

Were our human rights so limited or abused before our Human Rights Act? To say the court’s great virtue is that it is a supra-national authority insults our own highest courts; and that its merely “venial faults” are capable of being corrected is naive for any foreseeable future.

Allied to that, in arguing for a large reduction in MPs and therefore our legislators’ ability to maintain our human rights by properly scrutinising bills thoroughly before they become acts (albeit with an effective second chamber) John Dorward (Letters, 21 May) ignores that the number of ministers would need significant culling – or replacement by non-MPs.

John Birkett

Horseleys Park

St Andrews