What is the Human Rights Act?

By: Liz Lennox - Updated: 13 Feb 2017 | *Discuss

 

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The Human Rights Act 1998 is an act of Parliament which brought into the British Legal System certain elements of the European Convention On Human Rights.

To the ordinary man or woman on the street, the Human Rights Act is probably, at best, a mystery left to the purview of politicians and social commentators. At worst, I have heard it called a ‘reason for the do-gooders to get bent out of shape when protecting ingrates and CRIMINALS’; I would like to stress that this is the personal opinion of a friend and not my own commentary on the issue!

In point of fact The Human Rights Act is quite possibly the most important piece of legislation to be issued by the British Government; it is the beginning of legitimising a movement that has been in existence since before the Nuremberg Trials, as far back in history as the French and American revolutions. It is about admitting that not everyone is as nice as we would like to think they are and showing a united front to those who would seek to deal in injustice and oppression.

Un-Obtainable Ideals

To redress the balance it would seem to be easy to simply call for a world, and a society, that bases itself on respect for human rights; it is however a continual struggle to adjust current attitudes and, bizarrely, to explain to people why they need to respect the enigma that is ‘Human Rights’.

Isn’t This Just an Issue in Other Countries?

In a very real way the Human Rights Act begins to re-affirm those obligations that we forget and seeks to set them in stone, and in history.

It would be nice to think that the British Government was the arbiter of this change but, sadly, no. Our own Human Rights Act is a way of bringing some parts of the European Convention On Human Rights onto our law books. The actual chain of events is not the subject of this article; how our human rights laws originated could be seen as quite complex and is the subject of great legal tomes and lengthy debate. The greatest debate appears to be that The Human Rights Act only gives responsibility to public authorities, the act is still too young to be definitively applied to individuals. Hence, private claims for breach of Human Rights tend to go straight to the European Court Of Human Rights.

Essentially The Human Rights Act sets out our responsibilities as a society. As with any form of legislation, there are always people who would seek to interpret the content for their own ends; it seems very popular to start shouting about a violation of human rights whenever all other avenues are exhausted but the very fact that this is possible is a very real principle of the Act itself.

Do I Need to Know?

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