Andrew DUFF (LibDem, United Kingdom) has welcomed the Parliament's overwhelming endorsement today of the decision to negotiate the European Union's accession to the European Convention on Human Rights.

"This reform has been a long time coming", said Duff, who is constitutional affairs spokesman for ALDE and who was a member of the original Convention which drafted the Charter of Fundamental Rights.

"Accession to the Council of Europe's ECHR is the logical quid pro quo of the decision of the drafters of the Lisbon treaty to make the EU's own Charter of Fundamental Rights binding. It will provide a comprehensive superior rights regime across the EU, and give the European Court of Justice  enjoying the external supervision of the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg   new powers to develop the world's leading jurisprudence on fundamental rights".

"EU citizens are set to gain easier and more uniform access to justice across the whole of the Union."

"The accession of the EU to the ECHR marks a historic compromise between the intergovernmental Council of Europe and the more federal methods of the European Union.", he concluded.