derive from a long-developed notion ofnatural lawor natural rights, but the
modern applications can often be quite mundane, if still important. As
examples, cases to the European Court of Human Rights have varied from
complaints against court-martial procedures in European armies, through
restrictions on press freedom in English cases arising from contempt of court
orders, to the validity of corporal punishment in Scottish schools and the access
to lawyers of German suspected terrorists. Human rights are aspects of the
permanent fight of citizens against the power of thestate, and are to be found,
expressed in a variety of ways, as a working part of most legal systems and most
political theories. As world political and economic systems become more
integrated some sort of consensus may be developing about what rights exist
that no government may deny. Such a consensus has some real force, because
powerful and rich states like the USA or the leading European states are
increasingly making foreign or military aid, or treaty negotiations, conditional
on progress being made on human rights by the prospective recipient country.
TheHelsinkiagreements on European security specifically require human
rights standards as part of the development of military security agreements.
Such conceptions of rights however, continue to be ‘negative’ in that they
forbid governments to do things, rather than positive, requiring governments
to achieve goals like full employment.
Human Rights Act
The 1998 Human Rights Act (HRA) in the United Kingdom came into full
force in October 2000 and was one of the constitutional reforms initiated by
the 1997–2001 Labour Government. It was the result of years of pressure from
Human Rights activists and judges to do something about the fact that the UK,
almost alone amongst European democracies, had no formal bill of rights and
no effective court protection for individuals against potential legislative inroads
into internationally respected rights. What protection the English public law
system provided was only against improper administrative action; as long as the
Executive could point to legislative support for its actions, it could not be held
to account. A number of solutions were available including the calling of a
constitutional convention to draft and implement a brand new purpose-built
English Bill of Rights. The Government chose instead to take an effectively
incremental approach. Ever since the inception of the Council of Europe’s
European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the UK government had
been a signatory and subject to the jurisdiction of the European Court of
Human Rights. However these rights could not be relied on in the UK’s own
courts—they only ensured that, having failed at all levels of appeal inside the
UK legal system, a citizen could sue the government before the ECHR. Such a
process was very expensive, very slow, and only of use for well-supported
Human Rights Act