I Love The Human Rights Act (and you should too)
- Caitlin Ridgway
- Nov 9, 2018
- 3 min read
Today (9th November 2018) marks twenty years since New Labour passed the Human Rights Act, giving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) direct legal effect in the UK. Finally British citizens had a clear defined list of positive rights to liberty, freedom, protection from torture, marriage, and other things that would hold up in a court of law (during a fair trial of course). What wouldn’t you agree with about having basic human dignity protected by your elected government?
But clearly some people aren’t fans; our human rights have been coming under attack in the past decade. Conservative Party manifestos promised to scrap the Act with an election victory, and our current Prime Minister made the heart-warming declaration to “rip up” human rights legislation that got in the way of fighting terrorists, in response to the London attacks that occured just a week prior to the 2017 general election. Several years earlier May made no secret of her contempt for the laws, calling for a replacement “British Bill of Rights” instead of the transferred European legislation while Home Secretary - as if we’d want anything the Europeans had first!
However, aside from degrading the current rights and freedoms we enjoy, a “British” bill is completely unnecessary - the ECHR was supported by the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and one of its main writers was British, Conservative MP David Maxwell-Fyfe. The rights were put together by the Council of Europe, developed in the shattered world post-WWII, with the determination that the horrific genocide of Jews, homosexuals, Romani, disabled people and political prisoners would never happen again. Essentially, they were laying out the bare minimum expectations for how our fellow human beings should be treated - this cannot be interpreted as anything other than just and necessary.
These rights are the same rights protected under UK law today, yet politicians and media personalities attack them for undermining people’s safety. Past tabloid headlines have claimed convicted murderer Denis Nilsen was allowed pornography in his cell because of his human rights, or that Learco Chindamo could not be deported to his native Italy because of his human rights. Both assertions are entirely false - Nilsen was actually denied access to the material he wanted as he could not prove a breach of rights (there clearly was none) and Chindamo’s case was decided on a European directive which was entirely separate from the HRA.
What sensationalist clickbait articles will fail to tell you is all the fantastic achievements of the landmark law, so I will. The legalisation of same-sex marriage in 2014 was achieved in part by the enshrined human right to marry who you want. It prevented a domestic violence victim from being separated from her children after social services declared her to be making her family intentionally homeless without
justification. The victims of the Hillsborough disaster would never have gained a verdict of unlawful killing as a result of police incompetence, and consequently justice for the villainisation of Liverpool fans by the media and police, if it weren’t for article 2 of the HRA - the right to life - making a second, fair enquiry possible.
The Sun and other tabloids may well be deeply offended by the thought of freedom from discrimination and letting people live their lives (shock horror) but I personally bloody love the Human Rights Act. I feel safer knowing there is a definitive list of entitlements I should expect to have as a human being, and that if I felt they were violated I wouldn’t have to go all the way to Strasbourg to fight for them as people did pre-1998.
Twenty years on, where Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 gives authorities powers to detain citizens at borders without charge, hate crimes have risen by over 100% in two years, and the personal data of millions of innocent citizens is collected and stored by the government, it is more important than ever that we protect it like it protects us.
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