Has the charter of fundamental rights of the European Union taken the UK into new legal territory ask Charles Brasted & Cordelia Rayner
Since 1998, under the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA 1998), the main articles of the European Convention on Human Rights (the Convention) are directly enforceable in UK law through the domestic courts.
HRA 1998 not only embedded the well-established human rights into UK law but also provided a number of protective measures for them, namely by:
- requiring legislation to be read and given effect consistently with the Convention (s 3);
- making it unlawful for “public authorities” to act incompatibly with Convention rights, unless primary legislation required them to do so (s 6); and
- giving the courts the power to make “declarations of incompatibility” regarding legislation that could not be interpreted in accordance with the Convention, thus triggering a power (but not an obligation) for the appropriate minister to amend the offending legislation using a “fast-track” parliamentary procedure (ss 4 and 10, respectively).
Undoubtedly HRA 1998 raised the importance of human rights law in the UK, providing a
