Blair sets out his plans for Bill of Rights

Historic legislation giving British citizens a bill of rights will be put before the House of Commons by the end of the month.

Katherine Butler reports from Strasbourg.

In Strasbourg for a gathering of 40 European leaders, including the Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Germany's Helmut Kohl, Mr Blair committed the Government to early incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into British law. He promised a White Paper setting out the mechanics of this move in 10 days' time and publication of a Bill shortly afterwards.

The move, importing a vast body of European human rights case law directly into British law, should give individuals easier access to arbitration.

British rather than European judges will be entitled to rule on whether a person's fundamantal rights under the European Convention - the right to life, to privacy and to a fair trial, for example - have been violated and citizens will no longer have to take their challenges directly to Strasbourg, where the Human Rights court sits.

"I want the British people to be able to secure their human rights, not only from the European Court but also at home from their own judges. They should not have to go through the lengthy and often expensive process of appealing direct to the Commission and Court here in Strasbourg," said Mr Blair.

Britain was one of the founders of the Council of Europe and signed the Human Rights Convention in 1950, but the failure to enshrine its provisions in domestic law has meant that British cases appear before the Strasbourg court more than any others and Britons have generated the court's most high-profile rulings. In the 1970s it forced the criminalisation of homosexuality in Northern Ireland to be overturned, and outlawed birching in the Isle of Man. A ruling in a case brought by two Scottish teachers in 1982 led to the ending of corporal punishment in British schools and in 1995 the court condemned the British army for the "death on the rock" killings of three IRA suspects in Gibraltar.

Reforms to the European Court launched by leaders yesterday will speed the procedures and cut the waiting time for rulings, which can take up to three years. A single court will sit in permanent session from next year, assessing applications, and the present two-tier structure will be scrapped. British citizens will still be able to appeal to the Strasbourg judges.

Mr Blair also gave Britain's backing yesterday to a declaration committing governments to move towards the abolition of the death penalty. Officials stressed that a decision on abolishing capital punishment, still technically on the statute books for treason, still lay in the hands of parliament.

Mr Blair joined 39 European leaders in signing a commitment to ban human cloning. Chancellor Kohl also committed Germany to a national ban. "Looking back to a dark page of our history where barbarity ruled during the Nazi period, Germans take this issue very seriously," he said.