SIR - Shipley MP Philip Davies may be honourable. However, he is quite wrong to claim the Human Rights Act puts the rights of (ex) "criminals and illegal immigrants" above "victims and decent people".

Human rights apply equally to people of all colours, religion and levels of wealth or poverty.

PC Beshenivsky had, above all, a right to life. No individual was given the right to take this away.

Mr Davies says "We have enjoyed freedoms" for hundreds of years - enshrined in common law. "How did we manage" before the Act?

Only 70 or 80 years ago women couldn't vote on the same terms as men. Around 140 years ago children as young as 12 could be hung for stealing a loaf of bread. Other thieves were taken from family and friends and transported to the ends of the earth with no certainty of return.

More recently the UK Government was sued more than any other under the rights drawn up mainly by British lawyers after the Second World War.

Don't admit you are wrong, Phil. You have a "popular" soundbite, if out of step with legal experts and thinking people.

John Hall, Pennithorne Avenue, Baildon