Caught in the human rights act

Human Rights Act

The Human Rights Act 1998 is the main piece of legislation that regulates actions regarding human rights infringements. It came in to effect in the year 2000 and is concerned with governing and enforcing the relevant terms of the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law. The human rights act is essential for ensuring that individuals of everyday life are able to carry out life knowing they have their rights protected. The human rights act applies to every individual, the rights under the human rights act are assigned to every individual from birth and do not change regardless of working class, age, disability, gender, race, social status or position in authority.

European Convention on Human Rights

The European convention on Human Rights was the convention that implemented the various areas of rights that individual’s have. When implemented into UK law by the Human Rights Act, certain areas were missed out on purpose. Some sections were decidedly not carried in to UK legislation. Articles 2-12, 14 and the first 6 protocols of the convention were carried in to UK legislation. Article 13 is specifically missed because the government felt that the Human Rights Act itself meets the requirements of this article. There are 3 main forms of articles of rights from the Human Rights Act:

Absolute rights: Absolute rights are rights which cannot be violated in any circumstances from any individual. Article 2 is a good example of this, the right to life cannot be infringed upon under any circumstance.

Qualified rights: These rights, as implemented by the Human Rights Act, allow the government to interfere in some circumstances where it is deemed appropriate and necessary. This can be seen with article 10 freedom of expression. Under the Human Rights Act individuals have the right to freedom of expression, however law can interfere and restrict this in situations where other laws are applied such as the defamation law protecting individuals from defamatory statements being written about them.

Limited rights: There are certain rights that are limited dependent on the situation of an individual. If someone is in jail then article 5, the right to liberty, is limited as they must have restrictions on their lifestyle. In situations like these it’s essential to have limited rights because the legal system wouldn’t function if the right to liberty was an absolute right.

Whatever the level of right, if one of the rights is violated by a public body or private body, there are certain regulations in place. In the public sector an employer or person of authority is not able to breach an individual’s human rights in any way. Any breach can be taken to court under the Human Rights Act and the necessary legal proceedings will take place. The private sector is much harder to regulate as they are not required by the Human Rights Act to respect the convention rights.