Human Rights Act

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HUMAN RIGHTS ACT

Human Rights Act 1998 Impact on British Workers and Political Resistance

Human Rights Act 1998 Impact on British Workers and Political Resistance

Introduction

Ever since the enactment of the Human Rights Act (HRA) 1998 in October 2000, the term 'human rights' has been used to cover a wide area of state procedures, policies and law which would previously have been referred to as “workers' liberties” (Bamforth, 2004). Strictly speaking, the notion of human rights encompasses those inalienable rights which are considered to exist independently of the political process, whereas civil liberties refers to the limits on government power to protect individual freedoms. This paper presents an assessment of how the Human Rights Act 1998 has impacted on British workers and why is there so much political resistance against it in Britain.

Human Rights Act 1998 Implementation

The Human Rights Act became operative from October 2000. It allows workers to use the Convention as a means of securing justice in the British courts (Brown, 2003). Judges are now able to apply human rights law in their rulings. In modern times, the view that certain rights needed to be protected on a universal level arose out the experiences of the Second World War and resulted in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the European Convention on Human Rights (the ECHR, also referred to as the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms) in 1950 (Kavanagh, 2009). The UK played a key role in the drafting of the ECHR and was the first state to ratify it in 1951. The ECHR also established a court - the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) - to enforce the worker's rights obligations of its signatory states (Mello, 1999).

The effect of incorporation of the Convention is to introduce a new human rights culture into British politics (Hoffman & Rowe, 2003). The ultimate decision in any conflict lies with Parliament, not the courts. Some writers suggest that the measure changes the traditional balance between Parliament and the judiciary and gives much greater power to judges (Bamforth, 2004). Others suggest that important social change will continue to be brought about by elected politicians rather than judges, this having been the case in other countries that incorporated the Convention many years ago (Hoffman & Rowe, 2003).

Human Rights Act (HRA) 1998 and Workers Right

The Human Rights Act (HRA) 1998 incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into the law of the UK. The procedures of criminal justice - of crime prevention, detection, prosecution and punishment - inevitably impinge upon people's rights, and the HRA imposes a legal constraint to ensure that the government does not unreasonably suppress individual rights in its pursuit of the common good (Brown, 2003). Invoking a right of a worker is by no means always decisive (Mello, 1999). The convention distinguishes absolute rights (which may never be taken away), limited rights (which may only be compromised in explicitly identified specific circumstances) and qualified rights (where individual rights must be ...
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