DOUGLAS Unwin is wrong to claim compulsory EU human rights legislation is responsible for the Government's present problems with its new terrorism bill (Letters, March 9).
The Human Rights Act of 1998 was voluntarily passed by our parliament to bring the European Convention on Human Rights explicitly into British law. That convention was created by the Council of Europe in 1950 and ratified at Westminster the following year, several years before the European Union even came into being.
Incidentally, the Council of Europe was founded after a speech given by Winston Churchill in Zurich in 1946. Far from being "alien", the rights encapsulated by the Human Rights Act are the same "well established British laws, which evolved over centuries" mentioned by Mr Unwin. They include the right to know what offence you're charged with, the right to a trial and the right to hear the evidence against you.
These are all under threat, not from Europe, but from an increasingly autocratic Government which seems happy to take our legal system back into the 17th century.
Charles Anderson,
Springwood,
Haxby, York.
Updated: 09:32 Friday, March 11, 2005
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