'What is the ECHR? The truth is astonishing and we have almost no say,' writes Steven Barrett

It can mean the European Convention on Human Rights. The Convention is the list of basic human rights that we helped draft after WW2, based largely on pre-existing English principles of justice. So, confusingly, sometimes people use ECHR to mean the convention. If you put ECHR on its own into Google, you get the Convention – which is potentially going to confuse people.

But in the coming debate, that won’t be its meaning. ECHR will instead mean the European Court of Human Rights. The Court is a large building in Strasbourg. It has 46 Judges from 46 Member states.

The Member States are Slovenia, Austria, Norway, Andorra, France, Montenegro, Poland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Liechtenstein, Latvia, Armenia, Monaco, Slovak Republic, Finland, Cyprus, United Kingdom, Azerbaijan, North Macedonia, Netherlands, Hungary, Georgia, Spain, San Marino, Albania, Sweden, Italy, Türkiye, Malta, Germany, Estonia, Portugal, Greece, Switzerland, Belgium, Republic of Moldova, Czech Republic, Croatia, Ukraine, Iceland, Denmark, Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Luxembourg, and Ireland.

And it’s important to note that most of these places have legal systems which are alien to our legal system. There are, broadly speaking, two types of legal systems – a Common Law system and a Civil Law system. We have a Common Law system, yet most of these are Civil Law countries.

There is similarly a legal cultural divide in our expectations of what a Judge is. Our tradition is to make someone a judge, only after they have worked for years as a qualified lawyer – ideally in the Court they want to now sit as a Judge. But this is not the tradition in these countries.

Which is why the majority of the ‘judges’ are just legal academics. On the continent, academics are often held in great stature. We tend to acknowledge that they live in ‘ivory towers’ and may lack basic common sense.

LATEST OPINION:

• 'Ireland is facing difficult choices dealing with the migration crisis- is a hard border the answer?'
  
• Far-right? Look where the protests are...LABOUR strongholds - uncontrolled immigration concern spreads across political divide - Kelvin MacKenzie
• Britons aren't far-right or stupid Mr Starmer - they're angry and Labour doesn't care - Carole Malone

And there are further issues. Take the Turkish Judge. She’s connected to President Erdoğan in a way that would raise serious questions for a Judge in our UK Courts. The Bulgarian Judge is a former Minister in their Government – which we would find potentially troubling.

The Austrian Judge is a former Professor of Austrian Constitutional law. It is not obviously clear what she knows about our legal system or what skills she has that make her best placed to oversee it. Do you know much about the law in Latvia? Do you think the Latvian Judge will know much about our laws?

And what do these ‘judges’ do? It’s what they don’t do that’s more important. They do not go around the 46 countries fixing human rights abuses. If your rights are violated, then I’m afraid you have effectively zero chance of going. It takes years and the Court has no interest in enforcing basic cases.

The ‘Court’ instead is interested in novel cases. This means issues where it can pretend that whatever happened is a breach of one of the human rights and thus expand its power over the UK. You can be forgiven for cynicism if I ask, ‘Has it ever reduced its powers over us?’ – you’ll know the answer.

So, there we are. An office block in a foreign country, full of people expert in academic laws which are nothing like ours, who aren’t what we expect Judges to be - advancing some vague political cause over which we have almost no say. That’s what the ECHR is.