The following letter was published in today’s Stamford Mercury as my response to a letter from UKIP’s Roger Helmer MEP last week.

Roger Helmer, Stamford Mercury 26 June, writes about the European Convention on Human Rights and suggests we must withdraw from the EU to “recover control of human rights”.

Yet, when the UK state is denying human rights to our fellow citizens, the European Court provides the last resort to which to turn after our own justice system has failed them.

Helmer tells us “continental judges” don’t understand our culture but given human rights are universal, why should they need to? Does he believe that human rights vary depending which side of the English Channel someone is?

The ECHR is actually another British export success story, with British lawyers leading its development. It empowers individual citizens to hold states to account for human rights injustices, including our own, and benefits ordinary people pitted against an over-powerful state.

Helmer could quite easily come up with cases where the court has ruled in a way that may be widely unpopular. That does rather demonstrate the point. Actions by the state that may be popular with the majority of citizens may still violate the human rights of individuals. The ECHR protects individuals and groups that find themselves marginalised in society from persecution and must be retained.