MARTIN HOWE K.C.

This is my personal home page. For information about my professional activities as a barrister, please refer to the website at my Chambers: www.8newsquare.co.uk

• Working to complete the full implementation of Brexit, under which the whole United Kingdom would regain full control of our laws, borders, money and international trade, and which fully delivers what 17.4 million people voted for in the Referendum. I am Chairman of Lawyers for Britain which was founded to campaign for a Leave vote in the Referendum. Afterwards it continued developing and promoting legal solutions for a Brexit which restores our sovereignty, and does not leave us enmeshed as a vassal state or colony of the EU with no vote but still controlled by them. We provided much of the intellectual firepower leading to the rejection of Theresa May's deeply flawed deal, and its replacement by Boris Johnson's much improved but still incomplete arrangements. Now we are 90% towards restoring the UK's sovereignty, but with work still to do in replacing the Northern Ireland Protocol and the flawed Windsor Framework, and also ending the remaining areas of ECJ jurisdiction  under the Withdrawal Agreement. For details of my activities please see the Lawyers for Britain website,  my articles for the Daily and Sunday Telegraph (may need subscription to access) and on Conservative Home, and my Brexit Central author pages.
  
• Suporting the argument that now is the time for the UK to leave the European Convention on Human RIghts, as set out in my November 2023 paper published by the CBP. The Convention as originally drafted with British involvement contains a generally well balanced set of fundamental rights which enjoyed support across the political spectrum.  Unfortunately in the 70 years since the Convention came into force, the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg has 'interpreted' the Convention in ways which have changed its meaning from the original. In doing this, the Strasbourg Court has gone far beyond its proper judicial role of interpreting the Convention and has created new judge-made doctrines which do not exist in the actual wording of the Convention itself, and in some important areas are demonstrably contrary to the intentions of the States who drafted the Convention. The United Kingdom has the longest history of the protection of fundamental rights and liberties of any country in the world dating back to Magna Carta and before in England. We have no need for an international court to second guess our own courts in the protection of our liberties, and certainly not this Court which grossly oversteps the boundaries of its judicial role and has turned itself into a law-making body without a democratic mandate. We should now withdraw from the ECHR, and replace the Human Rights Act 1998 with a new Bill of Rights which will reaffirm our historic rights and liberties. I worked on reform of human rights laws as a member of the Coalition Government's Commission on a Bill of Rights for the UK, which reported with a majority favouring a UK Bill of Rights. I was previously a member of the Conservative Party's Commission to create a Bill of Rights (and Responsibilities) for the United Kingdom, which was established after David Cameron's speech of 26 June 2006, "Balancing freedom and security - A modern British Bill of Rights".
  
  I have spoken on many occasions in support of replacing the Human Rights Act with a British Bill of Rights. At The Times/Matrix Chambers Debate, speaking in favour of the motion were David Davis MP, myself and Andy Hayman, former head of Counter-Terrorism at Scotland Yard. We were opposed by Cherie Booth QC, Rabinder Singh QC and Shami Chakrabarti. I spoke at a debate organised by the Institute of Ideas (Podcast.)
  



• I chaired the Courts and Sentencing Policy Group of the Centre for Social Justice and launched our group's report with Iain Duncan Smith MP. This major report, "Order in the Courts: restoring faith through local justice" criticised the then Labour Government's over-centralisation of the criminal justice system and its torrent of legislation, and called for a much more locally accountable system of justice in which offenders can be dealt with more effectively. (See Executive Summary of the Report).
  
  

Political publications

For a selection of my publications on political and constitutional issues, see Publications. Recent publications are on the subjects of regaining our sovereignty and ending the remaining vestiges of EU control over our laws and European Court jusisdiction, how to safeguard our civil liberties through a new Bill of Rights for the United Kingdom, and I have written extensively on human rights and terrorism, and criminal justice and sentencing.

Legal Publications

Please click here for a selection of my legal publications, articles and lectures.