The UK Government’s current proposals for reform of the Human Rights Act 1998 are in equal measure unsurprising and astonishing

• Written by: Dr Elaine Webster — Strathclyde Law School — Director of the Centre for the Study of Human Rights Law
• Published: 4th March 2022

In light of the UK Government’s plans for reform, Dr Elaine Webster outlines why the Human Rights Act should be defended.

*This blog was written in March 2022. The Rights Removal was presented in Parliament on 22 June.

I began teaching a module on Human Rights Protection in the UK at Strathclyde Law School in 2009. In the first year, and every year teaching it thereafter, I opened the first seminar with a discussion of historian A.W. Brian Simpson’s magisterial book, Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention on Human Rights (2001). Simpson illuminates the fraught relationship between the UK and the European Convention on Human Rights, and the perspective amongst some that human rights essentially related to foreign affairs since they were sufficiently protected in Britain, the true home of liberty.

For this reason, I said in my seminars at that time that we might be dismayed by government impatience with the Human Rights Act, which gave effect to rights protected in the European Convention, but we should not be surprised. In 2009, the Human Rights Act was only ten years old yet it had already been subjected to the ire of Conservative Party leaders. In 2006, David Cameron was ‘talking tough on rights’, with a “pledge to scrap the Human Rights Act” (this link will take you away from our website). Years later I was still talking to students about the same subject; in 2015, David Cameron, then Prime Minister, said a new British Bill of Rights would “fix the mess” the Human Rights Act had created and “restore common sense” (this link will take you away from our website).

Resisting the UK Government’s current proposals for reform of the Human Rights Act 1998 is the latest episode in this history. In the first seminar of the module we also looked at Taking Liberties, an illustrated book published by the British Library to accompany an exhibition on the history of civil liberties in Britain. This book highlights the long battles outside of the legal system to secure and maintain progress, which are clearly ongoing and possibly always will be.

The Taking Liberties book is also important in that it shows how far we have come in the shift from the discourse of civil liberties to one of human rights in the UK. This has been a critical symbolic and practical change. Human rights are not just any legal rights; they are the legal entitlements that are most directly rooted in fundamental values of universality and respect for equality and dignity. They are not civil freedoms that we enjoy at the pleasure of each passing government. The current Government would prefer us to have, not rights grounded in international law, but liberties founded on parliamentary legislation so that they could modify them more easily; they would not even have to establish a ‘consultation’ to do so.

To take one example from the Ministry of Justice document, Question 10, which asks how government could “best ensure that the courts can focus on genuine human rights abuses”, implies that some people deserve protection whilst others’ experiences are not sufficiently important. This negates the whole premise of human rights protection, undermining principled universal application to all people based on respect for equality and human dignity. Not only is this offensive towards people’s lived experiences, it is not necessary since there are sufficient legal tests in place, including the requirement that people must meet the legal definition of a ‘victim’ in section 7 of the Human Rights Act in order to seek accountability through the legal system.

Fortunately there are progressive human rights approaches elsewhere in the UK. Closest to home, the political leadership and progress on incorporation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the recommendations of the National Taskforce on Human Rights Leadership have shown ground-breaking ambition to achieve stronger legal protection of human rights.

It is startling that the current UK Government insists on clinging to the past, instead of accepting that restricting governmental power makes for better governance. One of the key roles of human rights law is to hold governments to account. As Simpson says: “[…] human rights covenants, if they do anything at all, restrict the power of governments […] That is their function.” (p. 12)

I will throw in a final quote to sum up; this time in an international human rights law perspective, from the inspirational Juan E. Méndez, Argentinian human rights lawyer and civil society leader:

“Even with progressive legislation, the law is insufficient to protect all victims of all human rights violations; that is why I am convinced that the struggle for human rights requires […] the coordinated efforts of many people with different talents and skills. But I am also persuaded that the law and lawyers must continue to play a decisive role at the center of that struggle.” (Taking a Stand: The Evolution of Human Rights, 2011, p. 115).

This is why the legal framework of the Human Rights Act should be defended, and why coordinated efforts within civil society and the legal community are needed to resist the proposals for reform, again.

End of page.