A few weeks to save the Human Rights Act

We may only have a matter of weeks to save the Human Rights Act. Michael Gove is to lead the Tory charge to scrap it and replace it with a British Bill of Rights, with a proposal now being prepared for the Queen’s Speech.

We still don’t have all the details of what this would involve, but we do know it would stop the European Court of Human Rights from making binding judgments on UK cases. It is also believed the Tories will try to stop human rights from applying to all but “the most serious” cases brought before the British courts.

It was a Labour government that brought in the Human Rights Act in 1998. Since then, it has helped victims of rape sue the police for ignoring their complaints, held social services to account for failing child abuse victims, and enabled disabled people to challenge the bedroom tax. Meanwhile, the European Court of Human Rights has stopped LGBT people from being dismissed from the military because of their sexual orientation and made ground-breaking judgments in defence of workers’ rights.

If the Tories get the chance to define what kind of cases human rights can apply to, we may very well find ourselves in a situation where disabled people can’t challenge policies that unfairly discriminate against them, and where victims of rape and domestic violence can’t use the leverage of human rights to demand protection. If the European Court of Human Rights is to be ignored, then we will miss out on its protection over a range of issues in the future, not least the right to strike and privacy.

And what would casting human rights aside say about us as a country? Throughout Europe countries have signed up for membership of the European Court of Human Rights and accepted its judgments. If the Tories follow through on these plans we’ll join Belarus as the only European country not bound by the Court’s judgments. How will we be able to speak to other countries like Syria or China about human rights violations if we ourselves make a mockery of an international human rights court?

Our human rights framework gives people the chance to challenge abuses of power, negligence, and inequality. Defending it is an essential cause of Labour and the left.

Yet now its natural defenders are distracted as we gear up for a leadership election and begin an important period of internal contemplation. The Tories will seek to seize on this moment of introspection within Labour to push through a raft of policies we may otherwise block. We must not let them.

The new Tory majority in Parliament is wafer thin, and there are a handful of sensible voices on the Conservative benches who will vote down the changes to our human rights framework. But we in Labour must rally our own ranks and lead like-minded MPs on the left to defeat these plans for good.

Let us not lose focus in the coming weeks. We must defend the Human Rights Act and all those people who rely on it for protection.
Sarah Champion is MP for Rotherham