UK to leave EU

[emjay]

Well, I'm not particularly interested in the vaping argument because that looks like it's open to interpretation and more to the point it's not immediately relevant, for me, to what's going on right now. But what's much more concerning is the fact that the EU is not bound by the ECHR... that's the main thing I took from madog's posts. And I have since learnt that the EU has been given a 'legal identity' so it could actually be treated like a nation in the sense of being able to join the Council of Europe in its own right and therefore be bound by the ECHR... forming a kind of feedback loop with the Council that created it... but where it is - at the moment... and apparently been putting off joining for 42 years - outside that loop; so you have to have ratified the ECHR to join the Council of Europe, and you have to be a member of the Council of Europe to join the EU but there are 47 members of the Council of Europe and 28 members of the EU so you can be in the Council of Europe without being in the EU. So, outside the loop it means that EU directives that conflict with the ECHR can put Council of Europe members in a lose-lose situation where they can't please both sides and therefore face sanctions from one side or the other.

Whether that's actually happening, and if so on a large enough scale for it to be a serious problem, I have no idea, but the potential is there in principle and that is a concern. So it appears madog's preferred solution is to leave the EU and therefore cut them out of the loop and thus end the conflict of interests - rather than wait for them to accede - while expecting the UK to remain a member of the Council of Europe and thus keep the ECHR. But I fear that leaving the EU will just be one step on the slippery slope towards leaving the Council of Europe and thus becoming completely isolationist. So if the Tories want to leave the Council of Europe, fighting them will be my next priority, if we end up stuck with this decision to leave the EU. But looking at the Council of Europe website, Winston Churchill was one of it's founders so would they want to leave something with such a heritage? I don't know, but I hope madog is right in his optimism (for other reasons) that they wouldn't.

Well the whole EU doesn't follow the ECHR angle doesn't work because the EU's ECJ has upheld the European Convention on Human Rights as a fundamental bedrock of EU law. The EU has to abide by the convention, which is the basis upo which the Court of HR rules on.

Well I'm only just learning about this stuff now, and I have a ways to go, but as I understand it from madog the EU uses the ECHR as guidelines rather than being actually bound by it, and they use a different thing called 'Fundamental Rights' which is not quite the same.