Stephen Hockman QC considers the future of human rights in the UK
At the Lib Dem conference last month, the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, last month declared that “the Human Rights Act is here to stay”. He was quickly contradicted by Home Secretary Teresa May, who told the Tory conference she wanted rid of it, or at least parts of it. This pronouncement came as a result of May’s erroneous claim that a judge had ruled an illegal immigrant could not be deported because he had a pet cat. And so began “catgate”. So what’s really happening?
In early September, the justice secretary Kenneth Clarke, told Parliament he welcomed advice received privately in July 2011 from the government’s Commission on a Bill of Rights (CBR).
If implemented in full, this advice would require amendment of the European Convention on Human Rights (the Convention), the repositioning of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) as a remote and reflective source of occasional jurisprudential garnish, rather than a route to substantive redress for the individual as the Convention intended, and—still under discussion—the suggested
