I. VOTE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS

Our human rights laws help protect people everyday– but in recent years politicians have been attacking the very laws that are in place to protect us all.

This isn’t the society we want to live in. The latest polling shows that 84% of the public says the Government must protect everyone’s rights and freedoms equally.

This means that whoever wins the election must:

• protect our Human Rights Act, which ensures public authorities have to respect our rights and empowers us all to challenge them in our courts if they fall short
• safeguard the UK’s membership of the European Convention on Human Rights which holds governments accountable when they treat us badly
• scrap the Rwanda Act, the Illegal Migration Act and the Nationality and Borders Act – laws that have shamefully stripped basic human rights away from people who move to the UK.

Our polling shows that 87% of the public wants the Government to try to create a society where everyone is treated with dignity and respect.

But for decades, governments have wrongly tried to solve complex social issues by giving the UK’s systemically racist, sexist and violent police forces more powers and tools to criminalise people. Punishment can’t possibly solve the inequality, poverty and neglect that affects so many people’s lives.

This means the next Government must:

• end harmful policing practices that disproportionately impact racially marginalised groups – meaning powers to stop and search people without suspecting them of anything must be scrapped, the dehumanising and traumatising strip searching of people must be stopped, the roll-out of Tasers must be reversed and they should be limited to trained firearm officers
• scrap Joint Enterprise prosecutions that over-cimrinalise young Black men and boys based on their friendships
• ditch police surveillance technology that is unfairly used against communities of colour, like facial recognition tech
• stop the criminalisation of poverty by finally scrapping the Vagrancy Act and ending the use of Public Spaces Protection Orders and Community Protection Notices to punish people who sleep rough or beg.

No matter who we vote for, we all want people in positions of power to listen to our concerns and work to build a better future for us and our loved ones.

But in recent years, governments have attempted to shut down the ways people we can all make ourselves heard and challenge the decisions of those in power.

The next Government must:

• remove police powers to clamp down on noisy protests and scrap anti-protest offences like ‘locking on’ that see both protesters and people going about their day-to-day lives needlessly swept into the criminal justice system
• defend trade unions and workers’ rights by scrapping laws that limit the right to strike
• ditch Voter ID and commit to a democracy in which everyone can participate and hold those in power to account.