Britain threatens to quit European Court of Human Rights unless given final over rulings

Britain will quit the European Court of Human Rights unless it agrees that the Westminster parliament has the final say over its rulings, according to pre-election plans detailed on Friday by Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservative Party. Cameron, who is seeking to counter the threat from the anti-European Union UK Independence Party in May's national election, has said rulings by the European rights court had prevented Britain deporting suspected militants. He has also criticised the court for insisting on human rights on the battlefields of Afghanistan and upholding the rights of prisoners to vote.

"We do not require instruction on this from judges in Strasbourg," Cameron said to applause in a keynote speech earlier this week to the last Conservative Party conference before the election. The Conservatives are trying to bolster their support ahead of a probably close election next year, and the announcement received a warm welcome from Britain's right-leaning newspapers which have been vocal critics of the court, with the Daily Mail running a front page headline "End of human rights farce".

An opinion poll on Friday showed the Conservatives edging ahead of the centre-left opposition Labour party for the first time in more than two years. But support for UKIP stood at 14%, underscoring the threat it poses to both parties. Cameron has said he wants to bring back powers to London from Europe before an in-out referendum on Britain's membership of the EU that the Conservatives have promised if they win re-election.

Under the proposal, if the Conservatives win a parliamentary majority in May 2015, Britain will pass a Bill of Rights that would set out the application of human rights law in Britain. The proposed changes would mean the European court's rulings would no longer be binding over the Supreme Court and the Westminster parliament would have the right to veto the European court's judgments. The Human Rights Act, domestic legislation which enshrines the international principles of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) into British law, would be scrapped.

"Legal Blank Cheque"

"I think the people of this country believe that first of all there should not be a legal blank cheque to take human rights into areas were they have never applied before," Justice Secretary Chris Grayling told BBC radio. "We don't think those things should be decided in a European court. We think if they are to be addressed they should be discussed in this country, in our courts and in our parliament." If Britain could not reach such a deal, it would pull out of the human rights convention, Grayling said.

Britain is a founding member of the Council of Europe, the continent's leading rights organsation set up in 1949. All members have signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights, a treaty designed to protect human rights, democracy and the rule of law. The European Court of Human Rights oversees the implementation of the convention in the member states. The plan by the Conservatives depends on the party winning an outright majority in May's election. Its minority coalition partners in the current government, the Liberal Democrats, are opposed to limiting the powers of the court in Britain.

Dominic Grieve, who served as UK attorney general under Cameron until earlier this year, said the government's case made "a number of howlers which are simply factually inaccurate" such as an assertion that the ECHR had prevented Britain from upholding whole-life prison sentences. "I think that we are about to suffer what I would describe as a failure of ambition," Grieve told BBC radio. "We have always been a the heart of developing human rights on the world stage. We have very high status worldwide in doing that ... and actually the paper gives the impression of a retrenchment down to a very narrow focus indeed," he said.

There was no immediate comment from the Council of Europe or the European Court of Human Rights.