Human Rights

l. Please rest assured that a Conservative government will always speak up for freedom and human rights, at home and abroad.

To take your specific points in order:

Women’s human rights

The Conservative Party is committed to improving the lives of women, both in the UK and overseas.
In the UK, we have been calling strongly for a more coordinated, cross-government approach to violence against women with a much greater emphasis on preventative work. The specific steps we will take include ensuring appropriate training for police recruits in all forms of violence against women, increasing the number of health visitors to new mothers, teaching consent in the sex education curriculum and providing funding for up to fifteen new rape crisis centres.
We will also work to improve women’s lives overseas. The Conservative Party is committed to achieving, by 2013, the UN target of spending 0.7 per cent of national income as aid. A key aim of our aid is to make sure that everyone gets access to the basics: clean water, sanitation, healthcare and education. In addition, our manifesto pledges that we will focus particularly on the rights of women to access these services. We are committed to the Millennium Development Goals, including the target to get as many girls as boys into primary and secondary education. Ensuring equal participation of women across all spheres of society is crucial to economic growth and development. We also believe that using women as recipients of aid is an important way of improving development and ensuring equality.

Security and human rights

Governments have a duty to keep their citizens safe, but we believe that it is wrong to throw away our civil liberties in the process. Too often, that is what this Labour government has done. We will review and consolidate the reams of counter-terrorism law that Labour have passed. As part of this process, we will repeal the Identity Cards Act, end the abuse of stop and search powers, stop inappropriate spying by bodies such as local authorities, and launch a full review of the controversial Control Orders system.

Human rights in the United Kingdom

Labour’s Human Rights Act has failed to protect our historic freedoms, such as trial by jury, from repeated assault. For instance, it did not prevent the Government from putting before Parliament legislation which would have curtailed people’s rights to criticise religious beliefs and practices; nor has it protected the right to trial by jury in complex fraud cases; nor did it prevent the police retaining DNA samples from cleared suspects indefinitely. We will replace the Human Rights Act with a UK Bill of Rights to strengthen and protect our human and civil rights better. We will remain a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights and subject to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

The Millennium Development Goals

Human rights should, of course, be given full expression in the Millennium Development Goals review process in 2010. This year we have an important opportunity to get the Goals back on track, and as part of that effort, the international community should reflect on and take into account human rights issues.
The Conservative Human Rights Group, established in 2005, provides a forum for Party members and supporters with an interest in promoting human rights throughout the world. It holds regular speaker meetings, press conferences and events, and publishes an annual report on human rights. It has held inquiries into UN reform and issues such as sexual violence as a weapon of war.

Asylum and immigration

Political parties should all play their part in making sure the debate on asylum and immigration remains calm and rational. You may be aware that Trevor Phillips, the head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, has praised our approach to immigration. He said after one of David Cameron’s speeches that: ‘For the first time in my adult life I heard a party leader clearly attempting to deracialise the issue of immigration and to treat it like any other question of political and economic management… it would be wrong of us not to recognise it as a turning point in British politics’ (November 2007).

Any government is under a dual obligation to protect the integrity of our borders and enforce our immigration laws, whilst at the same time affording personal dignity to those whose claim for asylum has yet to be determined. We need a system where those who are genuine refugees are welcomed, but those who shouldn’t be here and can go home are required to leave quickly. The Conservative Party’s priority in Government would be to minimise the delays in the asylum system, to the advantage of both the genuine refugee and the taxpayer. We want an efficient and humane asylum system, instead of the current slow and complex method which is neither firm nor fair.