The government’s plans to overhaul flagship Human Rights Act

The government plans to overhaul the Human Rights Act by replacing it with a Bill of Rights that it says will restore “common sense” to how the law is applied in the UK. 

The new bill would “protect essential rights” such as “the right to a fair trial and the right to life” which are “a fundamental part of a modern democratic society”, according to the government proposals. It would seek to “reverse the mission creep that has meant human rights law being used for more and more purposes, and often with little regard for the rights of wider society”. 

Boris Johnson promised reform to the 1998 Human Rights Act in the Conservative Party’s 2019 manifesto, where he pledged to update the act to ensure “proper balance between the rights of individuals, our vital national security and effective government”. 

Dominic Raab, the justice secretary and deputy prime minister, said in December that the changes would “reinforce parliament’s role as ultimate decision maker, and strengthen rights such as freedom of speech”, reported the Financial Times. Many Conservative MPs have also criticised the existing legislation as encouraging “spurious” legal challenges against the government. 

But “lawyers and campaign groups have expressed alarm at the proposals”, arguing that they “will limit the duties on public authorities to protect people’s human rights, and make it harder for individuals to bring court cases for alleged breaches”, said the paper.

‘Plugging gaps’

The government proposals will “keep our human rights broadly as they are”, argued Alberto Costa, MP for South Leicestershire, and Adam Tomkins, a former Scottish Conservative MSP, in an article for The Times in February. They will “strengthen” aspects, such as a right to trial by jury, which will be “added to the corpus of human rights” and thereby “plugging a gap that, to a common lawyer, is all too glaring in continental charters of rights”, they wrote. 

“And, in addition to this, the all-important right to freedom of expression will be boosted,” they added. “As one judge famously put it, the right to speak only inoffensively is not worth having. This needs to be underscored in legislation, to avert the risk that this country’s long-standing commitment to freedom of speech is not eroded under the pressure of any new censoriousness.” 

Article source: https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/law/956171/human-rights-act-overhaul-bill-of-rights