Now it's blasphemy to mock Europe

Spectator, The, Nov 18, 2000 by Evans-Pritchard, Ambrose

No foundation or relevance in European law? Disculpe, Senor, the essential purpose of the European Convention on Human Rights, drafted by British lawyers, was to stop governmental bodies from getting uppity - i.e., resorting to 1930s Enabling Acts, and such like - and it has since been backed by a mountain of case law. In 1992, the Human Rights Court ruled in favour of a Basque lawyer, Miguel Castells, who had been imprisoned in Spain for writing `Outrageous Impunity' in a Basque magazine, accusing the Spanish government of collusion in the murder of Basque separatists. (He was correct, we now know. He was referring to the infamous death squads that led to the downfall of Felipe Gonzalez.) The Court said that governments have concentrated power on their side and must be exposed to unlimited criticism, adding that even insults and errors were `protected expression'.

One day, there will no doubt be a titanic struggle between the EU's Court of Justice and the Human Rights Court. In the meantime, the EU's court is answerable to nobody. It is a supreme court. If it says that fundamental rights can be restricted in this way, that is the end of the argument: these rights can be restricted. True, the Court has limited jurisdiction - at the moment. It cannot ban the sale of Mr Connolly's book at Heffer's or Blackwell's, yet. But its reach will extend deep into our national life once the new Charter of Fundamental Rights is approved at the Nice summit, for the Court of Justice will be the sole arbiter of those rights (whether or not the Charter is tacked on to the new treaty, or simply proclaimed).

You have only to read Article 52 (latest version) of the Charter to see where this is heading. It states that the European Union may limit all rights and freedoms enumerated in the Charter `subject to the principle of proportionality', where `necessary' in order to `meet objectives of general interest recognised by the Union'. When I asked the top figures of the drafting convention at a press conference what was to stop this `raison d'etat' clause being misused for authoritarian purposes, there were audible hisses from a number of EU journalists in the room, and the justice commissioner, Antonio Vitorino, let out one of those patronising little laughs that the EU elite has so perfected. Nobody really answered the question.

We had all better come to terms with the fact that the jurists entrusted with the power to decide what constitutes `proportionality', 'necessary', and the `general interest' of the Union are Ruiz-Jarabo Colomer and his colleagues in Luxembourg. Their intent cannot be clearer. We know, before the ink is even dry on the Charter, that the European Court will engage in rampant Wingrovism, pushing the envelope as far as it can whenever our rights clash with the papal ambitions of the EU. All that is needed now is the creation of an EU criminal jurisdiction, with its own prosecuting machinery. Preposterous? Last month the European Commission put forward a formal proposal for, yes, a European public prosecutor. If Tony Blair is amenable, it may be incorporated in the Nice Treaty in three weeks' time.