Unlike the people of every other democratic Commonwealth and European country, British citizens lack constitutional guarantees of our civil and political rights against the misuse of power by state authorities.

We also lack effective remedies for breaches of the European Convention on Human Rights.

That is why there have been so many British cases in which the UK has been found by the European Court and Commission of Human Rights to have breached the convention.

Again and again the European Commission and court have had to rescue British victims because of defects in our constitution and legal system.Parliament should give the same legal status to European Convention law as Parliament has given to EU law: making the convention's rights and freedoms part of our law, and enforceable in British courts.

All three branches of government should be legally bound to comply with the convention.Ministers and other public officers should have to respect human rights when exercising public powers, including obeying the vital principle of proportionality.

As with EU law, our statutes should be interpreted so as to accord with the convention.

And there should be effective domestic remedies for breaches of the duty to comply with the convention - including damages and injunctions.In the absence of a political consensus about the content of a British Bill of Rights, incorporation of the convention would be a modest but important first step towards a modern constitutional charter of rights.Anthony Lester QC.The European Convention of Human Rights was set up in 1953.

Its purpose was to protect the rights and freedoms of those who, even in the distant dark days of its conception in 1942, Churchill foresaw would eventually comprise the 'European family'.Originally a significant contributor of the concepts enshrined in the convention, British jurisprudence has today become far more a net consumer of its developed doctrines.

Nowhere is this European dimension and dividend of enlightenment better illustrated than in the context of free expression under art 10.Four Sunday Times cases over the past 20 years illustrate its increasing influence.

In 1975, we won the Crossman Diaries case - confirming that cabinet secrecy is flexible rather than fixed - without the need for recourse to Strasbourg; but we would certainly have gone there had we lost here.

In 1979, the European Court held that a 1973 injunction forbidding public debate of the merits of personal injury litigation was a breach of art 10, generating the reforms enshrined in the Contempt of Court Act 1981.The 1987 interlocutory injunction on our Spycatcher serialisation was held by the same court in 1991 also to be a breach, on the basis that it was futile trying to preserve confidentiality in Peter Wright's memoirs here once they had been published overseas.

In the Derbyshire case in 1993, the House of Lords held that a local authority had no right to sue for libel, principally on the ground that the common law reflects the right to free speech in the European Convention.The time factor alone - it took us six years in the thalidomide case and four in Spycatcher to obtain our remedies - is a sufficient argument for the incorporation of the convention into British law.Antony Whitaker.We believe that we live in a democracy, we believe that we live in a free country.

We believe that we can be whom we choose to be; say that which we choose to say, and conduct our lives in the way that we please.It is all very well being aware of what we cannot do: we are surrouned by legislation which grows and procreates from the first seeds of understanding that riding your bike on the pavement or attempting to buy cigarettes at 12 are against the law; but more dangerous and of graver consequences is an ignorance of that which we are allowed to do - of the human rights which attach to us as beings.In this country we have no declaration of rights, and just as this simplifies the procedure for adding to these rights we do have, it also makes it extremely easy to take them away.We have all come to anticipate the threatening nature of the Criminal Justice Bill and the way in which it will erode our rights.More important perhaps, is the need to be aware of proposals for apparently positive changes such as the 'politically correct' initiative to incorporate the European Convention on Human Rights into domestic law.

'Politically correct' it may well be, particularly when one considers the patronage and appointment procedure for our non-representative and unaccountable judiciary.Independence is the key to the development of human rights law - and that can only come from a supranational body such as the European Commission and the Court of Human Rights overseeing the convention.Human rights, whether in declaration or convention, exist to protect the individual from excess or abuse of public, governmental or authoritative powers and thus it is imperative that some independent and autonomous body, in the form of a tribunal or the like, is provided, to which the individual can turn.Mark Stephens.