It's being reported today that the UK government is considering introducing American-style gaol sentences of hundreds of years as a way of circumventing rulings of the European Court of Human Rights which say that 'whole-life' sentences are unacceptable. That this would be a ridiculous and wholly unnecessary step is, surely, obvious.
Sentencing a criminal to two or three hundred years imprisonment is nonsense, given that the human life span is, at most, 120ish. Such sentences mean life imprisonment without the possibility of parole and it is mere semantics to claim anything else. However, it seems that the ECHR sees things differently and is quite happy to buy into the semantics of the argument; for them, a sentence of, say, 299 years is capable of being reviewed while one of life is not, the possibility of review being the critical factor in their eyes.
That this is 'dancing on the head of a pin' is obvious and why our government should be engaged in such ludicrous nonsense is beyond me. Yet again, the ECHR, a court comprised of 'judges' with a variety of backgrounds and often from countries with abominable human rights' records of their own, is over-reaching itself. What right does this body have to interfere in our criminal justice system ? We do not maltreat prisoners, indeed, we more often mollycoddle them. Genuine life sentences are handed down only to the very worst of offenders and that is no one's business but our own.
Instead of using semantics to try to accommodate this crazy court, the UK government should quite simply tell it to go to hell and then withdraw this country from the associated European Convention on Human Rights. Why on earth do we allow this foreign court to have precedence over our own ? While this situation persists, our stupidly named 'Supreme Court' is no such thing, it is wholly subservient to a body of interfering crackpots whose own backgrounds are of dubious pedigree.
Who will rid us of this nonsensical arrangement ?
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