The British Bill of Rights
Today the government announced a new Bill of Rights to strengthen freedom of speech and curb bogus human rights claims, bringing an end to claims wasting taxpayers’ money and court time.
- Our human rights laws need reform – under the current system those convicted of hurting their own partners and children have evaded deportation by claiming it would breach their right to family life.
- That is why our new Bill will reinforce freedom of speech, while making sure that courts cannot interpret laws in ways that were never intended by Parliament. It will also introduce a new permission stage in court to prevent trivial legal claims wasting taxpayers’ money.
- These reforms will strengthen freedom of speech and the role of UK courts, while helping us to deport more foreign offenders and better protect the public from dangerous criminals.
Comments
Deputy Prime Minister, Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, Dominic Raab said:
"The Bill of Rights will strengthen our UK tradition of freedom whilst injecting a healthy dose of common sense into the system.
These reforms will reinforce freedom of speech, enable us to deport more foreign offenders and better protect the public from dangerous criminals."
The Bill of Rights will protect make it easier to deport foreign criminals by allowing future laws to restrict the circumstances in which their right to family life would trump public safety and the need to remove them.
It will mean that under future immigration laws, to evade removal a foreign criminal would have to prove that a child or dependent would come to overwhelming, unavoidable harm if they were deported.
As a result, any new laws will curb the abuse of the system that has seen those convicted of hurting their own partners and children evade removal by claiming it would breach their right to family life in the UK.
The Bill of Rights will also:
Boost freedom of the press and freedom of expression by introducing a stronger test for courts to consider before they can order journalists to disclose their sources.
Recognise that trial by jury is a fundamental component of fair trials in the UK.
This will be achieved while retaining the UK’s fundamental commitment to the European Convention on Human Rights.
Eight of the most important would be
The right to vote
The right to own property
Habeas Corpus (the right not to be arrested without charge or held without trial)
The right to free speech within the law
The right to marry, and the right not to be forced into marriage
The right to the presumption of innocence
Freedom of religion
The right to equal treatment in law
That is, however, nowhere near to being a full and comprehensive list.
All of those will be protected under the proposed British bill of rights, as will many others.
They are in schedule 1 of the bill, which starts on page 28 of the text of the bill which starts on page 32 of the PDF you can find at
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/cbill/58-03/0117/220117.pdf
And yes, this is a re-statement of the European Convention of Human Rights, from which the Bill does not propose to resile.