Reid Review Leaves Human Rights Act Unchanged

Nine years in government have transformed Labour's attitude to the Human Rights Act. Once heralded as the pride of a modern, optimistic new Labour government, it is now dismissed by the same politicians as an inconvenient relic.

The fact that the act has emerged unscathed and unamended from home secretary John Reid's review today says much about the Whitehall power politics that have been unleashed on law and order issues since he took up his post in May.

Mr Reid has proposed plenty of changes in his criminal justice review. He wants to force violent offenders to pay the healthcare costs of their victims, and to charge parents for damage caused by their children. More foreign offenders will be sent back home to serve their sentences.

There will be a presumption against bail for those who have violated previous bail orders, and regulations to ensure that parole violators are put back in prison quicker.

Early release schemes will be banned for the most serious offenders, and the sort of sentence-chopping that led to paedophile Craig Sweeney's five-year parole recommendation will be dropped. He also plans to stop the "plainly guilty" from being released on appeal because of "procedural irregularities".

All this sounds quite dramatic, but what is missing is what the country was promised: an all-out assault on the Human Rights Act, which we had been led to believe was at the core of all the government's problems.

How things have changed. In the aftermath of Labour's 1997 election victory, the Human Rights Act was emblematic of the changes Tony Blair's modernising government wanted to make to the country.

The act was passed in 1998 and came into force in 2000, and for several years remained relatively uncontroversial.

But the September 11 attacks, and the four terrorism acts that have been passed since that date, began to raise government hackles about the new legislation.

Back in 1997, Labour wanted to decentralise power from the state to the people. But since 2001, the government has concluded that voters want the state to enhance its power at the expense of suspected criminals and terrorists.

A key blow came in 2004, when the law lords applied the Human Rights Act to strike down provisions in the 2001 Anti-Terrorism Act allowing foreign terrorist suspects to be held without charge in London's high-security Belmarsh prison.

The government introduced control orders to allow the continued surveillance of terrorist suspects, but last month the high court ruled that these too went against the act.

The tension between the act and the government's freedom to make legislation, stoked by implacable opposition to the law from much of the press, meant that by the time Mr Reid became home secretary in May, the government was considering jettisoning or at least heavily amending the legislation.

In a letter to Mr Reid within days of him taking up his new post, Tony Blair mooted rewriting the 1998 law in favour of "the rights of the community for basic security" - widely interpreted as an attempt to make the law more amenable to a law-and-order agenda.

The hue and cry increased last month when the Tory leader, David Cameron, proposed tearing up the act and replacing it with a "bill of rights", a suggestion that remains Conservative policy.

In addition to this, the Human Rights Act has become the whipping boy for a range of issues where the government wants to project itself as being tough on crime. It has been invoked in the debates about the release of foreign prisoners and lenient sentencing by judges, despite the fact that judgements under the act have not affected legislation on either issue.

In particular, human rights considerations were blamed for the paroling of Anthony Rice, a serial sex offender who killed a woman nine months after being released (pdf)

In this context, the fact that the government today refused to amend or change the act is significant. There has been an ongoing fight within Whitehall between Mr Blair and Mr Reid - who have both made plenty of headlines with their populist attacks on human rights legislation - and Lords Goldsmith and Falconer, who as attorney-general and lord chancellor have to uphold the rights of the judiciary.

The two lords appear to have won this round of the battle. Despite the tough talk of "the rights of the victim over the offender" in the Commons today, the only part of Mr Reid's criminal justice shake-up to touch on the Human Rights Act is a pledge to ensure that frontline staff get practical advice to dispel "myths" about the law.

Those words could almost have been read from the script of human rights group Liberty, who accused (pdf) the Parole Board of misunderstanding the act in the Anthony Rice case.

Even more pointedly, another plank of the review will insist that Parole Board members have experience of "victims' issues", a broad hint that the Board itself, rather than the dastardly human rights lawyers blamed in the reporting of the Anthony Rice case, might need to change.

In addition, Mr Reid has himself been accused of peddling myths about the legislation by linking it to the Anthony Rice and foreign prisoner release cases. Standing up in the Commons and pledging to dispel those "myths" now feels uncomfortably like self-flagellation.