Part of Oral Answers to Questions — Justice – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 6 December 2016.
Joanna Cherry
Shadow SNP Westminster Group Leader (Justice and Home Affairs)
12:00,
6 December 2016
In recent years, it has become commonplace for some Conservative Members to deprecate the judges of the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights simply for doing their job. Does the Lord Chancellor agree that such scant respect for the rule of law has encouraged a climate in which a major tabloid, which I believe some people call a newspaper, thinks it is appropriate to describe justices of our own Supreme Court as “enemies of the people”?
Also referred to as the ECHR, the European Court of Human Rights was instituted as a place to hear Human Rights complaints from Council of Europe Member States; it consists of a number of judges equal to the number of Council of Europe seats (which currently stands at 45 at the time of writing), divided into four geographic- and gender-balanced "Sections" eac of which selects a Chamber (consisting of a President and six rotating justices), and a 17-member Grand Chamber consisting of a President, Vice-Presidents, and all Section Presidents, as well as a rotating selection of other justices from one of two balanced groups.
