"Two Cheers" for David Cameron, Who Wants to Reign In the U.K.'s "Human Rights" Racket

You can say a lot of bad things about Canada's "human rights" system--that it maintains a pecking order of victim groups; that it is fundamentally unfair and anti-democratic; that it leaves ordinary Canadians at the mercy of a bunch of hack "human rights" bureaucrats (shout out to Toronto's very own Barbara Hall!). There's one really good thing about it, though. At least it is in no way connected to the larger EU "human rights" racket in Strasbourg.

Thank heaven for small mercies, eh?

Given that added "human rights" layer, you can see why Cameron's Tories might want to ratchet back some of the more anti-democratic elements of the U.K.'s "human rights" apparatus--and why the move would be applauded, at least by some (via Melanie Phillips, who will be speaking in Toronto on the 27th):

But it isn’t just judges in Strasbourg whose powers the Tories propose to clip. The current practice whereby almost anyone with a grievance against a public body can turn it into a human-rights claim would be tackled with four measures affecting UK judges. Firstly, the Tories propose to prevent acts of parliament from being effectively rewritten by judges. Secondly, they propose to limit the use of human-rights laws to ‘the most serious cases’. Thirdly, rights will be balanced against responsibilities, so that, for example, a foreign national who takes the life of another person will not be able to resist deportation by relying on the human right of respect for family life. Fourthly, human-rights laws will be limited to dealing with issues arising in the UK, so as to prevent British armed forces overseas from being subject to persistent human-rights claims. 

The human-rights lobby responded with apoplexy...

It did? Quel shockeroo (not).

One wishes that Canada's Tories would tackle our own out-of-control system, but with an election looming in the spring that is the faintest of hopes.

FYI, here's the info about the upcoming Phillips event: