Taking Britain's Human Rights Act Seriously

The Human Rights Act of 1998 was one of the first pieces of legislation passed by Tony Blair's Labour government, and as such it symbolized heady hopes for a new, progressive era in British politics and law. These high expectations were disappointed, perhaps inevitably. Civil libertarians have been critical of the Labour government's policies of regulating welfare recipients, street people, and truants and of the illiberal treatment of terrorist suspects and religious extremists. Many wonder how effective the Human Rights Act can be, if government can so easily restrict individual freedom under its auspices. In two recent works Conor Gearty celebrates the Human Rights Act, not for bold interventions or radical change but, rather, for what he deems to be the act's appropriately modest aims and limited impact. I argue that this account diminishes the philosophical and political value of human rights. I highlight four problems with Gearty's argument: his democratic conception of rights, which threatens to dilute the capacity of rights to defend individual interests against the majority; his impatience with moral realist accounts of human rights; his inattention to questions of sovereignty; and, finally, his conservative approach to the content of human rights.