It’s Human Rights Day today. Earlier this week, Jim Wallace spoke to the Legal Services Agency Conference about protecting our rights. He remembered that he had found himself on the wrong end of a Human Rights Act judgement. His attitude was much better than Alex Salmond’s was when the SNP were found wanting 12 years later. At that point, he referred to people bringing actions under the Act as among “the vilest people on the planet.”

For my part, I spent decades as a Liberal and Liberal Democrat candidate and MP, supporting campaigns to incorporate the European Convention on Human Rights into our domestic law. “Bringing Rights Home” was our call; and so I understandably welcomed the passing of the Human Rights Act 1998. What never occurred to me during all the years of campaigning was that I would be the first government minister in the UK to be on wrong end of a decision under that Act. Yet on 11th of November 1999 that’s exactly what happened.

On that day, the Court ruled, in Starr & Chalmers v Ruxton that Temporary Sheriffs were unable to provide an independent and impartial tribunal and, as a result, as Justice Minister, I was forced to suspend every temporary Sheriff overnight.

Let’s not pretend. At the time,I would much rather that the case had been won. Losing put significant pressure on resources and made, for a time, the operation of our sheriff courts more difficult.

But of course in the cold light of day – the Court was right. The system had come to rely over much on the use of such temporary judges and the Appeal Court found that given the Lord Advocate’s key role in the appointment, dismissal and crucially the reappointment or not of temporary sheriffs, and his role as being head of the public prosecution system in Scotland, such sheriffs could not be regarded as sufficiently independent of the Executive to meet the requirements of Article 6 that an accused have a fair hearing before an “independent and impartial tribunal”

He looked at the consequences of Britain rolling back from the Human Rights Act:

As stated in the Conservative manifesto, the Government wishes to “curtail the role of the European Court of Human Rights”. Against that background one might be forgiven for speculating that the Prime Minister is seeking a loophole to suspend our obligations to the ECtHR – with all the consequences that has for a government which protests the importance of the rule of law. But even if the Cabinet Office is to be taken at his word, what kind of signal does it send out to the international community?

There is often much talk about Britain’s soft power as an influence for good in the world. But the opposite side of that coin is that if we are backsliding, we become an influence for injustice and intolerance. Only last week, Russian MPs voted to expand the law on the right of their Constitutional Court to annul rulings of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) to all international bodies for the protection of human rights.

Do we really want to give such actions justification, by allowing them to take an encouraging lead from the United Kingdom?

Closer to home, there is also a need to consider the domestic consequences of the ill thought through proposals to scrap the Human Rights Act, not least in relation to the devolved institutions in the UK.

You can read the whole speech here.