HUMAN RIGHTS DAY: CELEBRATING THE HUMAN RIGHTS ACT AND THE ECHR

This year, the Human Rights Act (HRA) turned 25 in October. A month later, the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) turned 75.

Since both became law, they’ve forced governments to respect our rights and empower us to seek justice.

For over 70 years, these laws have quietly underpinned our daily lives, giving us the ability to speak freely, love who we want, and ensuring we can hold those in power to account.

The Human Rights Act ‘brought rights home’. By embedding the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law, it meant people no longer had to take a long, expensive journey to Strasbourg to challenge a breach of their basic rights. Instead, they could finally seek justice here at home, in British courts.

And the difference this has made is enormous. 

It was the HRA that secured a second inquest for the Hillsborough families, overturning the harmful narrative that Liverpool supporters were to blame for the tragedy that killed them.

It was the HRA that forced police to properly investigate crimes against women and girls following the catastrophic failings in the case of the ‘black cab rapist’ John Worboys.

It was the HRA that helped bring about the UK’s first modern slavery laws, after Patience Asuquo used it to insist that police investigate the forced labour she had survived.

And it was the HRA that ended the unfair practice of withdrawing disabled children’s benefits during long hospital stays.

The Human Rights Act has protected each and every one of us. Public bodies have a legal duty to respect our human rights in the decisions they make every day. Many of the Act’s greatest wins are the injustices that never happened because policies were rewritten before harm could be done.

Through the years, the Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights have continuously come under threat.

Last month the Home Secretary announced the Government’s planned asylum and returns policy, which included reforms to the ECHR. In its attempt to look tough on immigration, the Government risks taking us down a road of no return by jeopardising the legal framework that protects us all.

The Government defended these reforms in the name of public interest, yet they are not being honest about what people stand to lose if they lay the groundwork for further diminishing our human rights. The ECHR is a vital foundation of our freedoms, and it is essential that any changes do not open the door to the slow erosion of our rights, now or in the future.

Human rights protect each and every one of us. They make our society a safer, kinder, more caring place. They were hard won. Let’s make sure they’re not easily lost.