The liberal case for scrapping the Human Rights Act

The repeal of the Human Rights Act, which incorporates the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law, has been a long time coming. David Cameron introduced the idea in 2006, and made it a Tory manifesto pledge at the 2015 General Election. It was thought that a public consultation would be published before Christmas 2015. However, speaking at the Home Affairs Select Committee in early December 2015, the then justice secretary Michael Gove said it would be put on hold until 2016.

For those who believe in human rights, repealing the Human Rights Act would be catastrophic – the reversal of centuries of popular struggle. The website for the campaign group Liberty – which has launched a campaign to ‘Save our Human Rights Act’ – includes a timeline, illustrating the history of human rights. The timeline puts the passing of the Human Rights Act in 1998 in the same lineage as the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which followed the French Revolution, and the sealing of Magna Carta by King John in 1215.

But the idea that the human rights we have today represent the culmination of centuries of popular struggle is nonsense. The international system of human-rights law we have today has little in common with the freedoms that were fought for by the radicals of the past. In the 17th and 18th centuries, radicals sought to assert the rights of the citizen against the power of the state. Today’s human-rights courts, by contrast, embolden unelected judges to determine the scope of our liberty.

Read here