A British judge renowned for his report on press ethics, Brian Leveson says UK courts no longer automatically defer to European Court of Human Rights’ rulings.
Leveson says he is not “crushed by the European jackboot” when it comes to applying the European convention of human rights in British courts. However, he is obliged to take the Strasbourg court’s rulings “into consideration”.
He said the convention was “devised in large part by British lawyers, reflecting British values, to ensure that the activities that we’d all heard about during the Second World War never repeated themselves”.
However, he did not outline the fate of future or current lawmaking on the topic.
“When the convention became a part of UK law it allowed our citizens to cite the convention directly. That doesn’t mean we are bound [by its decisions] … the legislation only requires us to take them into account,” he said.