In 2009, Dominic Raab then a youngish lawyer, a year before becoming an MP, wrote The assault on liberty—what went wrong with rights? (Fourth Estate). It urged that, while remaining a member of the European Convention on Human Rights, the Human Rights Act 1998 (the Act) should be replaced by a British Bill of Rights to ‘focus our judiciary on its primary task, which is to give effect to British rights instead of trying to divine and decipher the murky case law emanating from Strasbourg’.
No one could sensibly have imagined then that a little over a decade later Raab would be Justice Secretary, (pictured) heading government decision-making on reforming the Act.
What’s proposed?
On 14 December 2021, the Justice Secretary published ‘Human Rights Act reform—a modern Bill of Rights’, a consultation paper setting out the government’s proposals and inviting answers to 29 questions by 8 March. On the same day, he published ‘The independent Human Rights Act review’, conducted by a
