Michael Zander addresses one of the main Tory objections to the Human Rights Act
In the Conservative Party’s proposals for Changing Britain’s Human Rights Laws (October 2014) the first issue mentioned under the heading—The Case for Change— was “mission creep” by the Strasbourg Court: “Strasbourg adopts a principle of interpretation that regards the Convention as a ‘living instrument’. Even allowing for necessary changes over the decades, the ECtHR [the European Court of Human Rights] has used its ‘living instrument doctrine’ to expand Convention rights into new areas, and certainly beyond what the framers of the Convention had in mind when they signed up to it.”
Mr Dominic Raab MP, a solicitor, now a junior minister in the Ministry of Justice, raised the same issue in his book The Assault on Liberty (4th Estate 2009, p 131): “The [Strasbourg] judges came up with the ominous phrase ‘living instrument’ to try to justify the idea that their proper role was to legislate and update Convention rights. The Strasbourg Court was no longer confined to applying existing law. It was now explicitly in the business
