By way of a further footnote to my column yesterday suggesting that Britain should pull out of the European Court of Human Rights while remaining signatory to the Convention, a correspondent takes issue with my rather compressed reference to the Chahal judgment of 1996. I wrote:
At other times [Tony Blair] and his home secretaries talked of “revisiting” or even “repealing” the Chahal judgment of the European Court of Human Rights that would not allow the UK to deport a suspected terrorist.
My correspondent disagrees with my description of the judgment, and with the implication that it should be challenged:
In fact the UK is quite able to deport a suspected terrorist. The Chahal judgement was about someone who had not been convicted of any crime, but who had, while in India, been beaten to loss of consciousness, electrocuted on various parts of his body, and given a mock execution. We tried to send him back to India. The European Court decided that he would almost certainly face torture again if he were sent back there – and it was that fact that meant we were unable to deport him.
If we really decided that we wanted to be the type of country which sent individuals back to be electrocuted, beaten, and probably worse, we would need not just to stand back from the European Convention, but also the UN Convention against Тorture, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the European Torture Convention, and almost certainly the UN Refugee Convention. Then we really would be a pariah state.
There are important debates to be had about human rights, but it does not help when cases such as these are presented so misleadingly in newspapers such as your own.
I have replied thus:
I defer to your greater knowledge of the case. My understanding was that Chahal was suspected by the British Government of being “involved in planning and directing terrorist attacks in India, the United Kingdom and elsewhere”; that his claims of mistreatment by the Punjab police had not been corroborated; and that the finding of the European Court of Human Rights was that there was a “real risk” that he would be subjected to “torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” if he were returned to India.
The case was certainly cited as a precedent in advice to Tony Blair and his home secretaries that they would not be able to deport suspected terrorists to various countries.
So I do not accept that my article was misleading; it was an attempt to contribute to the important debates about human rights of which you write, including the debate about what degree of certainty of what degree of mistreatment in one country is the responsibility of another.
Eagle Eye 