With great power comes great responsibility. The same could be said of rights. But it is a principle we as a society have increasingly forgotten.

Today, MPs will debate the extent to which prisoners deserve the vote. There are arguments on both sides, and it is absolutely proper that the issue should be discussed. What is astonishing, however, is the extent to which this debate will be irrelevant, because the definition of what constitutes an inalienable ‘human right’ is barely any longer in the hands of our elected representatives to determine.

The European Convention on Human Rights, and its progeny the Court, were set up in the aftermath of the nightmares of the Holocaust and the tragedies of forced deportation. It was meant to stop a new Gestapo, to end the columns of push carts, and to hinder the NKVD. Its founding intent, in which British lawyers and politicians played a leading part, was of the noblest order.

The problem is that two generations on, its DNA has changed.

Of noble intent, somewhat subverted

Like a mediæval faith, the articles have become subject to revision and reinterpretation far from the founders’ intent. Today, the Court is a tool of activism, too often less an arena of rights than the ‘right on’. You can argue that individual rulings may have been good ones, or had beneficial effects – indeed, there have been so many now that have overruled the UK courts and Common Law that statistically the laws of mathematics alone mean we should expect some good judgements. That, sadly, is not the point.

The problem can be set out as threefold. Firstly, outside judges are making rulings (many of them arriving from a political rather than a judicial background) that lie beyond the ability of elected representatives to amend, which is a massive democratic deficit. Parliament – meaning the public – is no longer able to amend what is deemed bad. Secondly, this reality has been clearly recognised by campaigners, who exploit it in order to achieve their own narrow political ends that they cannot achieve by other means. Thirdly, this comes at an astonishing cost, as my research into the subject explores in some depth.

To add a fourth, the problem is getting worse, and attempts to control the problem (via the 1998 Human Rights Act) have actually seen the problem accelerate, while reducing the ability of the British judiciary to stand up for established precedent. Add to this a wayward compensation culture and an aggressive no-win-no-fee legal community, and the problems are clear.

The Prisoners’ Vote debate is more than an isolated controversy. It is a symptom. The public has become increasingly aware of the manner by which the institutions of the European Union intrude and assume power over decision-making in member states, carrying with them a train of burdens and costs. In contrast, one would have hoped better from the Council of Europe, which in other regards offers a glimpse of a happier model of peaceful and less regulated cooperation for the continent. But as long as centuries of distinct Common Law tradition are threatened by an imposed political agenda from Strasbourg, Britain’s democracy itself is threatened by radicalism. The founding principles of the Convention, today subverted, will in tragic irony foster a generation of political extremists increasingly supported by angry and dispossessed electors with nowhere else to turn.

So today’s debate does not lie in isolation. Our political scene will increasingly be littered with Strasbourg controversies. The only solution is a massive clean up of the entire system, starting with reappraising the country’s participation in the European Convention itself.