What was meant to protect now threatens

THE astonished fury of the ordinary citizen on learning last Thursday that the ECHR has declared it a violation of human rights to deprive convicted criminals of the vote should sound a loud tocsin through our complacent establishment.

This cannot be healthy. When the ECHR speaks, our primary response should be respectful. However, the kind of unwarranted interference in the settled will of a sovereign (just) nation state undermines everything that is good about the whole notion of a human rights convention, turning it into an enemy rather than a friend.

In 1959, when the ECHR was born, it set out a list of civil and political rights and freedoms to which those countries which ratified the convention subscribed. Just after a world war, this must have seemed an excellent idea. Even so, it took the UK until 1966 to grant the right of "individual petition" - ie the right to take a case to Strasbourg. Did wise people already smell trouble ahead? At first, this new creation seemed only benign. It took until about 1980 for individuals to notice its potential as a stick with which to beat institutions they disliked. By 2001, up to 14,000 appeals a year were being heard and there would be even more in 2005 except that many cases fall at the first domestic hurdle - 98 per cent of cases from Scotland, for example.

Those keen on the ECHR feel that statistics like the Scottish 98 per cent failure rate takes all the wind out of the sails of ECHR critics. Rather the opposite. Most of these 98 per cent of cases, the vast majority funded in some way or another by the increasingly wretched taxpayer, should never have been brought at all to any court. The ECHR has moved us into "have a go" country and even if many of those who have a go don't succeed, a culture of litigiousness and grievance is generated which spills over and encourages those who don't get as far as they would like down the human rights path to try other legal avenues - anti-discrimination or anti-racism legislation, for instance - in pursuit of that crock of gold known as compensation.

No wonder that over so many British kitchen tables any mention of the ECHR brings forth either a collective groan or hoots of derision. Under its auspices, the unexceptionable practice of appointing temporary sheriffs in Scotland was abolished; it is now a prisoner's "right" to be supplied with pornography; and, ably assisted by the Scottish Executive's hopeless incompetence, over 1,000 prisoners who have had to slop out are, unlike their victims, to receive a financial windfall at a cost of roughly 44 million. It's enough to make many see red. Surely this was not what the ECHR founding fathers had in mind?

In 2001, in a speech to the Bar Association of Madrid, the Lord Chancellor stoutly defended the ECHR, declaring that the act "allows British people to enforce their convention rights in British courts with British judges, sensitive to the needs and standards of our administration". What a splendid sentiment. Only it is not true. Going back to prisoner voting, British judges, taking the ECHR into account, threw the petition out. Judges in Strasbourg, despite being told the majority of British people would find the idea bizarre, told the British judges they were wrong.

Having said all that, I recognise that there is a body of opinion that finds ECHR rulings - even this latest one - perfectly acceptable. Juliet Lyon, the director of the Prison Reform Trust, for example, believes that the ECHR has done British justice a favour by giving prisoners the vote since maintaining a prisoner's link with society through the ballot box may help prevent reoffending,

Yet, as with so many ECHR rulings, her case is fatally undermined by the rhetoric employed by the ECHR beneficiaries. On Friday, we had the unedifying spectacle of John Hirst, the axe-murderer who started the whole prisoner voting ballyhoo, jubilantly declaring: "I've got the government on the run." Now, with more taxpayers' money, he intends to fight for prisoners to be paid the national minimum wage, 5.05 an hour for adults, for any work they do. Remorseful rehabilitation? More like an ECHR-sponsored two-fingered salute.

It is one of those neat paradoxes that the ECHR is both an admission of failure and a mark of success. That we need it at all recognises how far we are from being the "noble savages" of which Rousseau dreamt, while the fact that 41 countries are signed up to it shows that we are, at least, trying. But instead of bringing out the best in our humanity, the ECHR has begun to bring out the worst. This is what our leaders should understand. When ordinary citizens begin to use the phrase "human rights" with a despairing snort, something has gone badly wrong that badly needs putting right.