UK Bill of Rights

In June of 2006, Conservative leader David (call me ‘Dave’) Cameron said the Conservative party, if they got power in the next election, would consider scrapping the Human Rights Act (1998) and replace it with a British Bill of Rights. This Bill of Rights would protect the individual without protecting the terrorist or criminal, would protect our rights without protecting theirs.

I remember thinking at the time that it was stupid. The Bill of Rights proposed by Cameron couldn’t contain fewer rights than the Human Rights Act, since the Act already doesn’t include two of the articles of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Act is already as skinny as it could be made. Since the UK is a signitory of the Convention and a member of the EU, we have to follow the ECHR or have the ECHR rights upheld by the European Court of Human Rights. So a Bill of Rights would have to look very similar to the current Human Rights Act. One might consider that Cameron wanted to give people more rights, but since his ’sell’ was about how the Bill of Rights would not protect criminals and terrorists that was highly unlikely.

Now it turns out that a Joint Committee on Human Rights has suggested that we scrap the Human Rights Act and bring in a British Bill of Rights. This time the suggestion is that we include economic rights as well as the rights of the ECHR. Which is interesting.

Of course, the UK Parliament has no method of creating a Bill of Rights. One of the fundamental rules of the UK Parliamentary sustem is the supremacy of Parliament. Parliament today can not bind Parliament tomorrow, else Parliament tomorrow is not supreme. As such, Parliament can revoke any act made by a previous Parliament, including but not limited to removing us from the EU, since our participation in it is contained in an act of Parliament. There is a lot of debate in the political circles as to whether Parliament is actually still supreme with the EU able to make binding legislation on us. It is. Someone who submits themself to the rule of another under their own freewill and retaining the power to remove themselves from that situation any time they wish is still in control. Parliament is still in control.

It has been suggested more than once that Parliament could hold a referrendum to implement the Bill of Rights. However, referrenda are not binding. They are opinion polls of the citizens of the country, not legislation. Parliament is sovereign, not the people. The people get to choose who goes to Parliament to represent them, but that is their only power. Unlike in America where the foundation of the society is the people[1], in the UK the people only serve to legitimise the Parliament.

The formation of other countries’ codified constitutions have almost always been born in revolution and large scale violence. The UK is quite special in the developed world, and in democracies in general, by having an unwritten constitution, Israel is the only other democratic country I can think of off the top of my head which has (or at least had, last time I looked) an unwritten constitution like the UK. Even China has a written constitution (though I’d hazard a guess that it doesn’t protect many human rights).

Amusingly, most constitutions of the world are based on the observations of the UK system, which is why we have never had a constitution historically and why it took until 1998 for the ECHR to be enshrined in UK law. The ECHR was written largly by British lawyers, with British consultants. It was based on the rights held as fundamental by Britain and as such Britain was never expected to do anything other than sign and endorse the document while other countries were expected to alter their laws to put the ECHR centre stage. We incorporated the ECHR in 1998 because of the embarrasment of being the second worst human rights violator in Europe (Italy was number one). We went from guiding principle to second worst offender in the space of fifty or so years.

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[1] The preamble of the US Constitution contains the ideological grounding for the whole document and, although not law in itself, is used by Supreme Court Judges to guide them in their decisions. It reads:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” – Preamble to the US Constitution.

The important part being “We the people…” indicating that the document is by and for them.