Damned straight

Courtesy of the Melanie Phillips blog, this little judgement on the problems Europe is having with its own Supreme Court:

The issue is much deeper than how the European judges have behaved. The real problem lies with human rights law itself.
The liberties of this country traditionally rested on the fact that rights were not codified but grew out of English common law. As a result, everything was permitted unless it was expressly prohibited. Once codified into statute law, however, rights became dependent on what the courts said they were. So, far from expanding our liberties human rights law has diminished them.
The justification is that human rights are universal principles to which no reasonable person could object. But the fact is that these are all abstract rights which have to be balanced against other rights. So these ‘universal’ principles are actually the product of the highly subjective prejudices and whims of the judges who conduct this trade-off process.
And forget Latvians or legally unqualified trade unionists at Strasbourg; our own judges operate human rights law through a highly ideological and even dictatorial prism.

Rico says you can say what you will about our Supreme Court, at least its judges are not "eected by a committee chaired by a Latvian politician, on which the UK representatives are a Labour politician with a trade union background and no legal qualifications and a Conservative politician who was called to the Bar in 1972 but has never actually practised law".
Rico says, given that President Obama is liable to need to appoint one or more Justices to the Court while he's in office, a big hurrah for our system over that of the Europeans...