Yesterday I gave paper at the Newcastle Law School, part of some ongoing work looking at media representations of human rights cases and issues. The paper’s title was “All wrapped up in tomorrow’s chip paper – what do we learn about the reporting of human rights by British newspapers?”. The abstract is below
In this short blog, I am not planning to set out the paper in full but thought it might be a helpful contribution to the debate about possible repeal of the HRA to set out some of the findings I have made. In particular, this shows how skewed Daily Mail reporting in relation to deportation of foreign criminals is. The paper does not argue why this might be but simply asserts that regular readers of The Daily Mail will have a very different idea of the likelihood of a foreign criminal being deported at the end of the their sentence that is the reality. 
In short, of all such stories in the paper (or, in fact and more accurately on-line) for a one year period (ending last week) – and there were 31 – 83.8% indicated very clearly that the Home Secretary’s attempt to deport was defeated on human rights grounds. This compares to an historic four-year mean (2009-2012) of 17.6% success rate for claimants, based on the Home Office’s own data. In fact if we included the massive drop in the %age success rate for claimants in both 2013 and 2014 (at 5.4% and 0.17% respectively) the mean is much lower, but there are good reasons to exclude these. Put another way, the regular reader of The Daily Mail – assuming they both believe the stories and digest them into a probability! – would think of every 100 attempts to deport, the Home Secretary wins a shade under 17. In fact, the reverse is true: of every 100 deportations attempted by the Home Secretary, foreign criminals successfully oppose only, on average, about 17. The Home Office data – in the form of a Parliamentary answer to a question asked by new MoJ Minister, in charge of HRA repeal, Dominic Raab MP – is set out below
As the manifestos were published in the run up to the election, I blogged about the fact that the Tories had placed their pledge about repealing the HRA in the section on crime, specifically about victims of crime (alongside placing it in the section on the EU) – and not in that section of the manifesto devoted to constitutional matters, or citizen and state. What seemed a bit of a puzzle now starts to make sense. Reason replaced by rhetoric backed by the reproduction of unreality – the sort of thing that leads to moral panic, to a clamour “to do something”. Well that something – a British Bill of Rights and loosening of ties to Strasbourg – is now well and truly upon us. Let’s hope that tomorrow’s chip paper is not the parchment of the HRA
protestmatters 