Human Rights - how far?
 

I have mentioned elsewhere how the European Human Rights Act is screwing up our ability to enforce other laws in the UK. An article in the news today prompted me to propose this thread:

A known arsonist was granted the right to have access to matches by the courts, as to deprive the person would have been an infringement of their individual human right to be able to light the cigarettes they smoked through habit. The person concerned had been arrested having been caught at 4.00 am one morning coating a number of cars with paint stripper. The prosecution argued that, in addition to restrictions proposed as result of the actual offence commited, as a known arsonist the accused should also be restricted access to matches as a sensible course of action, but the defence argued and persuaded the court otherwise.

Perhaps, one of the less serious examples of how the the Act works against common sense, but an otherwise reasonable illustration of the problems that it has created.

More worrying is the way the Act will be used by known and active extremists to defend their right to freedom of speech and to preach their doctrine. The UK government has introduced legislation to be able to deport/imprison those that incite hatred of and harm to our country. The trouble is it is a difficult conviction to achieve and the human rights defence is expected to see an accused person tie up the courts for several years thereby neutralising the legislation's purpose.

Is the UK alone in having such a problem? Is the Human Rights Act doing more harm than good? The rights of the majority to be protected from such risks as the two I have mentioned (and hundreds more) fall by the wayside, and that seems a nonsense to me.

Is National Health giving Viagra and Cialis to your pedophiles yet?

Oh, and just wait until you start getting prosecutions for "hate crimes."

Welcome to the new world order.

That's what worried me, I suppose I had that feeling that it was already going to be worse across the pond. Clever how our politicians think that they can improve matters by introducing such legislation. So far as I can see it's going to have an adverse effect on tolerance (did I really need to say 'going to' - both times?)!

Tolerance is a one way street. If you are a member of the majority group (doesn't matter which one) ... nothing you do qualifies.

Since there are flameless ways to light cigarettes, I would have argued, as the prosecution, that the defendant could take advantage of those devices and therefore maintain his rights to smoke.

Sheesh.

Since when do you need a flame to start a fire anyway?

Seems like matches would only be a small portion of the things that should be taken from this guy. That is if you believe it makes any sense at all to keep the guy from having matches/lighter anyway. (seems silly to me because how do you enforce this?)

If a guy's so screwed up that mere possession of ordinary implements must be forbidden to him, it's probably more sensible to keep him in prison than try to forbid him to be near such near-ubiqtuous instruments.

That is, forbidding matches is futile and pointless and the Human Rights Act preventing that action is not really an argument against the act.

The word 'matches' was used as an attention grabber - the pros was after all types of fire-lighting material. Enforcing it is the other stupid part. We have things called ASBOs (anti-social behaviour orders) which are siupposed to stop people doing the things they shouldn' do. It's as naive a solution as it seems as enforcing it eats up even more time (police and courts). That's progress for you.

And of course we still have the situation of people asking others for a light which generally works quite well and once the cigarette of the arsonist is lit, well....

The whole thing is crazy and the fact that we have a Human Rights law that is used to argue the case instead of the 'he can get a light anyway' approach doesn't improve matters one bit

that it is used as the basis for the defence in the first case and is then accepted is worrying though...