SNP blasts government plan to replace human rights laws as 'ill-judged and irresponsible'

SNP blasts government plan to replace human rights laws as ‘ill-judged and irresponsible’

The UK government’s plans to replace human rights laws are “ill-judged and irresponsible”, the SNP’s John Swinney has said.

Human rights

UK justice secretary Dominic Raab last week unveiled plans for a new Bill of Rights which would “revise and replace the framework provided under the Human Rights Act”. Deputy first minister Swinney said the proposals amount to an attack on human rights and there should be no changes to the law.

Human rights laws are devolved and responsibility for overseeing obligations in Scotland rests with the Scottish Parliament. In a letter to Raab, the deputy first minister said the Human Rights Act is “woven directly into the fabric of the current constitutional settlement” so changes would require legislative consent from Holyrood.

Swinney said:

The Human Rights Act has a 20-year track record of delivering justice, including for some of the most vulnerable people in our society.

Expert evidence gathered by the UK Government’s own independent review demonstrates beyond argument that replacing the Act is not just unnecessary, but undesirable.

The UK Government’s plans are ill-judged and irresponsible.

The Scottish Government has repeatedly emphasised that there must be no changes to the Human Rights Act that would undermine or weaken existing human rights safeguards in Scotland, or indeed elsewhere in the UK.

Comments 1

Mike Sands says:

4 years ago

There are 47 Member States or Signatories to the Council of Europe or if you prefer the European Council of which the UK is one. The UK is in fact one of the founding signatories on 5th May 1949 along with other Founding Members,The Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, France, Norway, Sweden, Ireland and Italy.
This means that the UK along with the other 46 signatory states is signed up to the ECHR (European Convention on Human Rights) which was derived from the UDHR (Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. This is a matter of fact.
The Council of Europe had been called for by Winston Churchill as early as 1943. The rapporteur of the committee that drafted the convention was Solicitor General in the Churchill government, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe.
The convention was signed at the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, 4 November 1950. This of course being entirely separate from The Treaty of Rome signed on 25 March 1957, which gave rise to the EEC.
The European Convention on Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights (established in 1959) are completely separate, independent of and from the later creation of the European Union. This means that British folk are amongst 820 million citizens under the aegis of the ECHR and ECtHR
The right wing press (The Daily Mail, Express, Times, The Sun) in Britain conflate the ECHR and ECtHR with the EU and have given all sorts of fake headlines, misinformation and outright lies concerning both the ECHR and ECtHR. They would have us believe, along with people like Johnson, Gove, Farage, Banks, and yanks Bannon and Breitbart that in leaving the EU Britain has left these, that is simply not the case.