What’s the point of the Human Rights Act? Michael Zander on an important lecture by Dinah Rose QC
Dinah Rose QC, one of the country’s leading human rights lawyers, in a lecture last month asked whether we actually need the European Convention on Human Rights (the Convention) and the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA 1998). It had to be acknowledged, she said, that: “[F]or a variety of reasons, the Human Rights Act has been a public relations disaster (though in substance a relative success) for our civil liberties in Britain. Rights, and the enforcement of rights, which were once seen as being entirely, indeed distinctively, British, are now popularly regarded as a foreign imposition, beneficial only to foreigners and criminals.”
At least in respect of substantive law, in her view, the common law would cover most of the same ground as HRA 1998. Common law rights were vibrant and were now the renewed focus of important decisions of our appellate courts. The common law had been particularly powerful in protecting the rights
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