THE issue of human rights has become a political hot potato at United Kingdom level.

During a debate on the Equality and Human Rights Commission Wales’ annual report in the Senedd, I stressed that the European Convention was in the best interests of Wales.

It seems bizarre to me that those of us who believe in the concept of human rights are finding ourselves in a position of having to constantly defend that position.

It does not reflect well on the political culture of the UK as a whole that one of the two mainstream parties now threatens to withdraw from an institution that we entered with the encouragement of Winston Churchill.

How times have changed. Far be it for me to suggest that, perhaps, one of the reasons for the hostility towards the Convention is the fact that the European courts regularly found against UK Conservative Governments in the 1980s and 1990s. It was a time, of course, when the Conservative Party was still very proud of Section 28, and a time when it was being discovered just how many miscarriages of justice had occurred in the 1970s and 1980s because of the inability to protect the rights of those accused of serious crimes – in fact, many people jailed were totally innocent. There are well documented examples in South Wales of miscarriages. If you look at many of its rulings now, they are things that we take for granted as essential rights of the citizen: the right to visit children in care, the right to have representation for appeals against criminal convictions, and, perhaps ironically, given the ideological views of the Government at the time, the right to not have to join a trade union. Indeed, with its threats to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, the Conservative Party finds itself lining up alongside those bastions of democracy Belarus and Kazakhstan, and even going further than Vladimir Putin, who has not even threatened to withdraw Russia from the ECHR.

The value of the ECHR is as clear as ever. It remains there to protect the vulnerable from the abuses of the state. It remains there to remind us of the atrocities of the Second World War and, in particular, the commitment made by the countries of Europe, following the 1939-1945 conflict , to never ever again allow state power to go unchecked, and to protect Europe’s minorities.