It’s dangerous when any government thinks it can decide who deserves access to human rights and who doesn’t.
The UK’s Human Rights Act (HRA) is a safety net and a crucial source of legal protection for people across all UK nations who have been mistreated or failed by the system.
But the government has just launched a consultation on its plan to replace it with a weaker bill of rights.
The new bill from the Ministry of Justice would distance UK courts from case law of the European Court of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights.
Human rights legislation is all about people, power, and how they are balanced. The current act protects all of us when we’re at our most vulnerable, but the new bill is based on the false premise that basic human rights for all somehow take away rights from others.
We’re talking about protections that have ensured elderly couples aren’t separated by hundreds of miles when just one of them needs care; about protections that have safeguarded women under threat of domestic violence, so they can keep their police-recommended panic room, without having their benefits penalised under the ‘bedroom tax’ rules.
The HRA also led to cases that secured rights for the LGBT+ community and those with mental or physical disabilities. And of course, without the European Convention on Human Rights, the gross negligence behind the deaths at Hillsborough would never have been uncovered.
These and many other cases have relied on the full extent of the current legal systems. No country that signed up to the convention expected it to always be easy or convenient, but they recognised the importance of committing to it.
The government’s own independent review bodies (the Independent Commission on Human Rights and the Independent Human Rights Act Review Panel), recently held two reviews and concluded there is no need to change the current legislation.
So, we must ask, why is there still this insistence on replacing the act with a bill of rights?
Some suggest the new bill of rights is simply ‘sensible tweaks’ and a ‘necessary re-balancing’, but the result will be weakened rights and fewer protections, and is perhaps just so the government can gain populist votes.
Furthermore, unless the government decides to take the unlikely and dramatic decision to stop being a signatory to the convention that it was instrumental in drafting, then every UK citizen will still be able to access the European courts, to seek redress where they have exhausted their own government processes anyway.
So, perversely, the effect of limiting someone’s access to justice within the UK will only lead to more cases being heard by the European courts.
These proposals are just the latest draconian measures aimed at stripping away our basic rights and freedoms, alongside attacks on our rights to protest and moves to restrict our access to voting.
Standing alongside Liberty, the British Institute of Human Rights, and countless other organisations, UNISON is responding to the consultation to resist anything that weakens access to these most fundamental rights.
UNISON will always hold the government to account and call on them to use their precious time and resources to ensure our public services protect our dignity and rights, rather than dismantling them.
Download a briefing guide to the proposed reforms (Word document)