When capital punishment was abolished in Britain in 1965, to the public’s great displeasure, we were assured that convicted murderers would be given life sentences and that “life would mean life.” But last year the European Court of Human Rights ruled that life sentences must provide for appeal and review and now our own Court of Appeal is about to pronounce on whether this shall be so or not. The ECHR is of the opinion that whole life sentences without the possibility of review or appeal are inhumane and infringe the murderers’ human rights.

This is a subversive opinion announced by a Court notorious for its subversion of the moral order, and therefore of abrogating the very principle of justice it was created to uphold. There are no rights in wrongs. One who commits murder thereby places himself outside the usual social framework of rights. He is correctly described as an outlaw. Moreover, it is not society which makes him into an outlaw, but entirely his own doing by means of his crime. A convicted murderer must, If there is no death penalty, expect to have his freedom removed for the remainder of his days. This is just, and we know directly and intuitively that it is just. Try considering the alternative expressed as a simple proposition: “Killers should go free.” It is patently absurd. In effect it involves declaring that the murderer should not be punished but rewarded for his crime by being granted his freedom.

None of this is merely hypothetical. Between 2000 and 2010, thirty convicted murderers were freed and killed again. There have been a further five such atrocities in the last four years alone.

And it is not the murderer alone who bears responsibility for these deaths: the authorities who grant him his release are responsible too. The problem is that here we have a perverted notion of what responsibility means, as the Court which would free a murderer does so out of a perceived responsibility concerning the murderer’s rights: but this involves having no responsibility concerning the lives of those he is freed to kill.

Thus the social morality of the ECHR is a precise inversion of rational ethics and it amounts to the satanic principle: “Evil, be thou my good.”