Lord Neuberger: We can ignore Stasbourg

Posted By: James

Tuesday 12th August 2014

Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury has said that British judges should be more prepared to ignore rulings of the ECHR. The president of the Supreme Court said judges in this country have sometimes been "too ready" to follow decisions from Strasbourg. In a speech at the Supreme Court of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, he remarked that the court's rulings may not always fit Britain's legal and constitutional systems. "UK judges have, I suspect, sometimes been too ready to assume that a decision, even a single decision of a section of that court, represents the law according to Strasbourg, and accordingly to follow it," he said. "I think we may sometimes have been too ready to treat Strasbourg court decisions as if they were determinations by a UK court whose decisions were binding on us." He commented that Strasbourg's rulings sometimes seemed "a little surprising or even inappropriate" because European lawyers had "misunderstood or misappreciated" Britain's common law system. "It is a civilian court under enormous pressure - and it has produced a number of inconsistent decisions," he said, adding that Britain was required to take account of Strasbourg's rulings but not necessarily follow them.

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