TONY BLAIR and other senior ministers are using human rights law as an excuse for failures in the running of the Government, a parliamentary report published today says.

The Prime Minister and the Home Secretary are accused of defending unpopular decisions by making unfounded claims about the Human Rights Act. The report by peers and MPs condemns the Government for not admitting that its allegations about the Act are unfounded, accusing it of fuelling public disquiet about the Act. The criticism follows rows over a decision to allow hijackers to stay in Britain, a failure to consider foreign prisoners for deportation and lack of supervision of a rapist who killed while on parole.

Misunderstandings about the Act would continue “so long as very senior ministers make unfounded assertions against the Act and use it as a scapegoat for administrative failings in their departments”, says the report by the all-party Lords and Commons Joint Committee on Human Rights.

“In each case, very senior ministers, from the Prime Minister down, made assertions that the Human Rights Act, or judges or officials interpreting it, were responsible for certain unpopular decisions when these assertions were unfounded.” The Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, QC, had agreed that none of the three cases justified the Act’s amendment or repeal.

The High Court decision in May to allow nine hijackers to remain here until they could safely return to Afghanistan had been a correct interpretation of the Act. The men were fleeing the Taleban when, in 2000, armed with guns and explosives, they hijacked a Boeing 727 to Stansted, and held the plane for 70 hours before surrendering.

The Home Office said that they were not a security risk to Britain. Yet John Reid called the court’s decision inexplicable and Mr Blair called it an abuse of common sense. Yet Lord Falconer accepted that the decision was based on human rights laws preventing deportation where the person faces death or torture, the report says. “In our view, high-level ministerial criticisms of court judgments in human rights cases as an abuse of common sense, or bizarre or inexplicable, only serve to fuel public misperception.”

It also criticises Mr Blair and Mr Reid for giving the impression that the Human Rights Act had prevented the deportation of foreign prisoners. More than a thousand were released without being considered for deportation, which led to the dismissal of Charles Clarke as Home Secretary. The Prime Minister said that he would introduce a presumption to deport foreign prisoners irrespective of claims that their home country may not be safe. Yet neither the Department for Constitutional Affairs nor the Home Office produced evidence that the Act, as opposed to administrative error, was behind the problem.

In the case of Anthony Rice, who murdered Naomi Bryant in 2005, nine months after he was released on parole from a 16-year term for rape, the committee found no evidence that consideration of his human rights had received precedence over public protection; failures in the prison, probation and police services had allowed Rice to murder Ms Bryant.

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