The Brighton Conference.

Britain is currently trying to use it's six month Presidency of the Council of Europe to reform the Europe Court of Human Rights (ECHR). This is the equivalent of putting a fox in charge of a hen house or a paedophile in charge of a nursery school or feel free to insert your own culturally acceptable description of a very bad idea. However Britain is today (19/4/12) hosting a mulit-national conference on ECHR reform in Brighton.

The main thing that Britain is pushing for is enshrining the ECHR's subsidiarity which basically means that it will not longer be able to over-rule national courts. For the small number of often quite silly cases that Britain brings before the ECHR this sounds like a good idea but in countries like Russia and Kyrgystan where the ECHR does the bulk of it's work this will have a very serious impact giving people no recourse against very corrupt local courts.

Obviously the main story at the conference will be Britain's attempts to deport Abu Qatada to Jordan. Complex as that case is it is also being used as a metaphor for my grandmother's Court of Protection (COP) case. The British plan was that I would immediately appeal the COP's December decision meaning I would have spent the first part of 2012 so caught up in legal and domestic stress I would have been totally incapable of commenting on things like Libya and Syria. In order to pressure me into appealing Britain made a lot of noise about the fact there is a three month time limit to mount an appeal in criminal cases. This was even a major theme in the BBC drama "Public Enemies" with Anna Friel and Daniel Mays. The only problem is that the COP case was a civil case rather then a criminal case so the time limit doesn't apply. Funnily enough some of the best legal minds in Europe worked that one out for themselves and informed Britain of this by telling them that the time limit for Qatada's appeal has not expired.

There is also the issue that while Britain wishes for the COP judgement to be viewed as an isolated error by a Judge having a bad day other people could view it as part of a pattern of behaviour that constitutes a criminal conspiracy. If you consider it to be that latter then the obligation is not on me to appeal but on the Crown to prosecute or to be left open to possible prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC). This debate is being covered by Abdelhakim Belhadj's attempts to prosecute members of the previous (Labour) British government over torture and extraordinary rendition.