The Human Rights Act in a Culture of Control

Greene, Alan

Abstract

The UK is currently in the midst of a robust backlash against human rights. The election of a Conservative majority to Government in the 2015 general election with the express pledge of repealing the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA) in its manifesto has placed both its future and the UK’s continued accession to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) high on the political agenda. That stated, the HRA was always on politically contentious ground with calls for its repeal being voiced since its enactment and this enactment itself delayed due to concerns regarding its impact. Such ‘rights hostility’ in the UK may be explained by political scepticism towards all things ‘European’— a hostility that still persists even after the UK’s vote to leave the European Union (EU)— and the UK’s constitutional order that has always had an, at best, ambivalent attitude towards the judicial vindication of human rights. This chapter, however, argues that these explanations are not the entire picture. This chapter commences with a brief over-view of these standard rights critiques in public law discourse: namely, from the conception of rights by political constitutionalists as inherently political constructs, the scope of which should be left to the political branches; and Euro-scepticism which views human rights as a foreign imposition on the UK.

Citation

Greene, A. (2017). The Human Rights Act in a Culture of Control. In C. Smyth, & R. Lang (Eds.), The future of human rights in the UK (4-26). Cambridge Scholars Press. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2901018

• Acceptance Date: Jun 12, 2017
• Online Publication Date: Oct 1, 2017
• Publication Date: Oct 1, 2017
• Deposit Date: Jun 12, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 1, 2019
• Pages: 4-26
• Book Title: The future of human rights in the UK.
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2901018
• Publisher URL: https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-4438-9513-2
• Related Public URLs: https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2901018