The United Kingdom signed and ratified the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). This convention is a binding international agreement that the UK helped to draft and has sought to comply with for over half a century. The convention enshrines fundamental civil and political rights, but for many years it was not part of our own law. Using the convention usually meant taking a case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. This was often time-consuming and expensive.
Since coming into force on 2 October 2000, the Human Rights Act has made rights from the ECHR enforceable in our own courts. This is much quicker and simpler than the old arrangement.
The new law does three simple things about the rights and freedoms in the European Convention on Human Rights:
This means that the Act makes it simpler for UK judges to help you if your rights are trampled on - and all your public services must do everything they can to prevent that happening in the first place.
No. The Human Rights Act is British legislation. The European Convention on Human Rights, which is the source of the Act, was largely drafted by British lawyers and is a treaty agreement from the Council of Europe, not the European Union. The European Union has recently drawn up a Charter of Fundamental Rights.
The Human Rights Act means that we can all be clearer about basic values and standards we share. That's a good idea when it comes to sorting out problems.
The Act means that all public authorities must pay proper attention to your rights when they are making decisions that affect you.
There is no express definition of "public authority" in the Act but the term includes:
No. The Human Rights Act is about basic fairness for all people. It is about understanding the respect due to each of us. It is about recognising that some rights and freedoms are so important and so fundamental that should be protected by law. It is not about getting people off on technicalities and our Courts have not treated it in that way.
The Human Rights Act was carefully drafted to preserve the primacy of Parliament. Put simply, judges can't overrule Parliament. If a judge finds that a piece of primary legislation is incompatible with the Act, (s) he can make a "declaration of incompatibility", but it remains for Parliament to decide what, if any, action to take.
Click on declarations of incompatibility table [PDF 112Kb, 9 pages] for a table of all declarations of incompatibility made under section 4 of the Human Rights Act to date, including those overturned on appeal. Just about a dozen in a period of over five years.
No. Statistics from the first year of the Act being fully in force show only very small increases in the total work of the Courts. Senior judges themselves have commented that the Act has not disrupted the system, rather it has complimented it.
The Government announced its intention to set up a Commission for Equality and Human Rights on 30 October 2003. Details of the announcement can be found here. For further information and progress on the Commission click on Commission for Equality and Human Rights.
The UK has ratified Protocols 1, 6 and 13. The UK has not yet ratified the other protocols containing substantive rights (Protocols 4, 7 and 12). These are under review.
The rights in Protocols 1 and 6 are already there. Those in other Protocols can be added in future by order without the need for fresh primary legislation.
The Government has undertaken a review of the UK's obligations under various international treaties including the UN treaties. The outcome of this review will be announced later this year.
The European Union Charter of Fundamental Rights sets out in a single text civil, political, economic and social rights enjoyed in the Member States.
These rights are grouped into six chapters:
The Charter is not intended to lay down new rights - but it draws existing rights together and makes them much more visible to the citizen. It was also intended to remind the Union institutions of the rights they should respect in discharging their responsibilities.
The Presidents of the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission signed and proclaimed the Charter on behalf of their institutions on 7 December 2000 in Nice. The Charter is a political declaration - it has no legal force. As such the future legal status of the Charter is a matter of current debate and will be decided by the Member States in the near future.
Most national Governments have a list of citizen's basic rights and liberties which the State must respect. At European level we have the European Convention on Human Rights, but that system does not control the European Union's institutions. And the ECHR does not cover quite a lot of the fundamental rights and freedoms already agreed for the EU. So the Charter will make more visible to EU citizens that they have, for example, rights to vote in elections for the European Parliament, rights to work and set up businesses in other Member States, rights of access to EU documents and rights to complain to the EU ombudsman.
Charter Article 51 states: "This Charter does not extend the scope of application of Union law beyond the powers of the Union or establish any new power or task for the Union, or modify powers and tasks defined in the other Parts of the Constitution." So the Charter will not extend Union powers as set out elsewhere in the EU Constitution treaty, and the Charter applies to the Member States only when they are implementing Union law. It is firmly established that the Charter shall not give any new powers to Europe.
Many of the provisions in the so-called "Solidarity" chapter of the Charter are guiding principles, not legal rights as such. The changes the UK helped to negotiate to the Charter's special rules of interpretation (especially Charter Article 52(5)) help clarify this. In any case the Charter does not allow the Union to go beyond the powers already agreed for it - and the UK helped negotiate changes to the Charter to make that crystal clear too.
The rights set out in the Charter do not in themselves give the EU any power to legislate - any such power must be set out in other parts of the EU Constitution Treaty. But EU action in other areas where it does have power to act under the Constitution Treaty may affect fundamental rights indirectly. In such cases a Charter right may be relevant even if it is outside EU competence as such.
The Charter does not change the existing system of legal remedies at EU level. Member States and their courts remain the prime guardians of their peoples' rights.
Nothing in the Charter changes the Union's powers as agreed by the Member States. The Charter's provisions about criminal justice are modelled closely on the ECHR, which is already basic law in the UK.