Laetitia Nakache | The Constitution Unit Blog

The UK government intends to replace the Human Rights Act with a new ‘British bill of rights’. However, any change to existing human rights law promises to be a complex and difficult project. On March 7 Dr Jeff King, Senior Lecturer at UCL Faculty of Law, explored the current state of play and considered the past, present and future of the HRA. Laëtitia Nakache reports.

After the 2015 general election David Cameron said that the repeal of Human Rights Act (HRA) would be brought forward rapidly. The Conservative party had pledged in their 2015 manifesto to abolish the HRA and replace it with a British bill of rights, in order to ‘break the formal link between British courts and the European Court of Human Rights, and make our [the UK] Supreme Court the ultimate arbiter of human rights matters in the UK.’ Since then the government’s plan to scrap the HRA has been delayed a number of times, with the consultation on the proposed British bill of rights now not expected to be published until after the EU referendum. In this political climate, Dr Jeff King came to the Constitution Unit on March 7 to discuss the past, present and future of human rights law in the UK.

The past: genesis, aims and impact of the HRA

The United Kingdom acceded to the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) in March 1951. Though it was obliged under Article 46 to give effect to judgments of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), it was not until the 1960s that British citizens were able to bring claims in the Strasbourg court. Since then, the evolution of the UK law has been influenced by the Strasbourg jurisprudence and by 1998 a broad political consensus existed that UK involvement in the Strasbourg system was politically desirable.

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Individual electoral registration (IER) has been a huge project, requiring co-ordination between the Cabinet Office, Government Digital Service, Electoral Commission and electoral registration officers in local authorities. On January 25 representatives from these four bodies discussed the challenges they faced and how the project is being brought to a successful conclusion at a Constitution Unit seminar. Roberta Damiani and Laëtitia Nakache offer an overview.

Individual electoral registration (IER) has brought about a significant change in how British electors register to vote. The emphasis is on the term ‘individual’. Previously, one person in every household was responsible for registering everyone who lived at that address; now, with IER, each person is required to register individually. Designing and implementing such a system was a challenge, not only from a human point of view but also from a technological one, as it required a huge amount of data to be digitised and processed. But it also offers exciting opportunities to make citizens more engaged in the democratic process. This blog highlights the key issues debated at an event about IER hosted by The Constitution Unit on 25 January and chaired by Dr Alan Renwick.

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