The European Court of Human Rights has not had a good press in this country lately, and for very good reasons, many would say. Mostly, we don’t in this country see the need for any judicial system but our own to defend our human rights. Some of the ECHR’s recent rulings, notably those connected with the Abu Qatada case, reduce many of us to a condition of impotent fury. The court’s proceedings take for ever. It is grossly inefficient. Half its judges have no previous judicial experience, and the other half only at a junior level. And on and on. I have, all the same, found myself reporting one or two cases in which it handed down sensible decisions, notably its March 2011 judgment that crucifixes may be displayed in Italy’s public schools. Fr Federico Lombardi said that the Holy See had received the ruling “with satisfaction”, calling it historical, and opining that the decision recognised “that the culture of the rights of man must not be in opposition to the religious foundations of European civilisation, to which Christianity has made an essential contribution”. Well, maybe that was going a bit far, but it was a good decision all the same, and the kind of thing the ECHR ought in an ideal world to be doing. So occasionally, such decisions, on behalf of the citizen and against a nation’s own courts, do seem even to such as me occasionally to justify the court’s existence. In fairness, therefore, ought we to look a bit more closely at this train of thought? The most convincing argument seems to be that the Council of Europe, whose member countries recognise, in theory, the Court’s authority, includes some countries where the government itself regularly inflicts on its population quite gross human rights violations, and where the ECHR is the only hope, in many cases, of getting some kind of redress. If, by the reforms we want, we weaken it substantially; or if we start ignoring its judgments as many Tory MPs (and often people like me too) would like, that would greatly weaken the court’s authority internationally (only 2.4 per cent of the court’s judgments after all have to do with this country), and deliver whole populations into the hands of tyrannical governments, who would simply say, well, if the Brits ignore the court, why shouldn’t we? This argument was put this week in The Independent newspaper by Tara Lyle, Policy Adviser to Amnesty International UK, who asks firstly whether the Court is really the villain it is being presented as, and secondly, “what are the implications of crippling the power of the Court for the 800 million individuals for whom it is the last recourse against governments with dismal records on human rights eclipsed only by their appalling records on accountability?” She highlights the example of the Russian Federation: