Human Rights Act 1998

Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe Excerpts

Thursday 14th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for drawing attention to this important subject, and for finding an opportunity to note the many improvements to life in the UK brought about by the Human Rights Act 1998. Her comments are a timely reminder of how much the HRA has achieved for all UK citizens.

Unlike other distinguished contributors to this debate, I am far from being a legal expert. I come at it from a general sense that the HRA has had a positive and enlightening effect on the way the UK perceives justice and has had a particularly beneficial impact on public services. The HRA compels public organisations—the Government, the police and local councils—to treat everyone equally, with fairness, dignity and respect.

The HRA is now embedded in the work of public authorities. Instances of this have been highlighted by my noble friend, but I also note that it was a humans rights case that finally decriminalised male homosexual acts in Northern Ireland, in 1982, and it was a violation of human rights under the HRA that led to a change in UK law that allowed gay members of the Armed Forces to be open about their sexuality.

The HRA has achieved lasting improvement in individuals’ lives by helping to develop an everyday human rights culture across the UK. It is not just the stuff of high-profile and often controversial court cases; indeed, it often acts to stop cases before they go to court. Despite that, criticism of and antipathy towards the HRA run throughout public and political discourse. I believe this to be misplaced. Indeed, when reading for this debate, it was instructive to see how much of the opposition to the HRA is based on mythology. The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, highlighted this in his oral evidence to the Joint Committee on Human Rights earlier this month. He busted the myth that the HRA has reduced the power of Parliament to legislate as it sees fit. European Court of Human Rights judgments are not binding on our courts, so why do the Government feel the need to include provisions that assert parliamentary sovereignty in their proposed, and rather unhappily titled, Bill of Rights Bill? There is also a myth that, because of the HRA, courts may be interpreting laws in ways that were never intended by Parliament, thereby undermining parliamentary democracy. But what court judgments exist to give substance to that view?

As others have observed, much of the mythology surrounding the exercising of human rights stems from media misrepresentation, not least the tabloids’ obsession with the HRA as a “chancers’ charter”. I can add to my noble friend’s litany of things the HRA is not responsible for. The HRA is not the reason why the police cannot put up wanted posters. A UK judge on the European Court of Human Rights did not call for axe murderers to be given the vote; in fact, he said it was important for the UK to implement the Hirst judgment that the blanket ban on voting by convicted prisoners was unlawful. Myths about the HRA may start in the Daily Mail but they become part of the popular discourse about human rights. To counter that, we need a better understanding of our fundamental rights, how the UK’s human rights framework works and how our rights are enforced.

An important recommendation from the independent HRA review was for an effective programme of civic and constitutional education on human rights and individual responsibilities. That was touched on recently in this House in an Oral Question on citizenship education, which in recent years has been allowed to fall away in our schools. We need to do better. Does the Minister agree that a good start would be to extend the statutory entitlement to citizenship education to primary schools?

The Human Rights Act helps to protect the most vulnerable in our communities, but it serves us all. How human rights are applied and how competing rights are balanced may vary depending on the context, but that does not affect their universal nature. Human rights apply to everyone. They are the deep foundations of our lives and of our laws, and they exist because of our humanity, not because of what we have done in our lives. Does the Minister agree that, much as my noble friend Lady Whitaker said, human rights recognise that everyone is of equal worth?

May I further ask the Minister whether, in these troubled times, when the UK is seeking to ask other countries to respect human rights and international law, he will acknowledge that many of the Bill of Rights proposals would put the UK in breach of its international obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights? That would be a shameful state of affairs.