How to Advance Social Rights without Jeopardising the Human Rights Act 1998

When the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was drafted, governments grasped that human rights are needed as safeguards, not only against authoritarianism but also against the causes of authoritarianism. For this reason, the UDHR encompasses civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights. This holistic vision of human rights was obscured during the Cold War and more recently by economic neo‐liberalism. The UK government neglects social rights, which have a very low public profile, although there is evidence that the profile of these human rights is increasing. UK domestic law and practice is inconsistent with the holistic vision of human rights and the government's binding international social rights obligations. The UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights recommends that the UK provides for ‘the legislative recognition of social rights’ which can be approached in various ways. One way is to proceed social right by social right (for example, the rights to housing, health and education), and sector by sector (for example, the sectors of housing, health and education). This administrative law approach advances explicit social rights without implicating or jeopardising the Human Rights Act 1998.     

Human Rights in Policing: The Past,Present and Future

This article seeks to demonstrate, largely from practitioners’ perspectives, the growing evolution in understanding and implementation of meaningful human rights standards within the policing context. In the early 2000s, human rights were perceived and treated as a rather restrictive framework in UK policing. They are now more readily seen as a set of tools that guide and help the police to balance the views and interests of all parties to the criminal justice process. Human rights values enable police in the UK to better endeavour to do the right thing, ‘without fear or favour’.     

Human Rights in the Public Sector

This article examines how universal human rights have been given practical effect in the UK through the Human Rights Act. It focusses on the role of human rights in public services and using the duty placed on public officials as a lever to bring about positive change.     

On the Other Side of the Curtain: A Reassessment of Non-Elite Human Rights Experiences and Values in Poland

In this paper, I explore the formation of human rights attitudes among what I call the “silent majority” in the post-communist countries of Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. This is the large, diverse group of people never directly confronted with harsh methods of repression under communism. I argue here that the foundations for conceptualizing human rights are based on the degree and saliency of exposure to rights violations and that, for many citizens of Central and Eastern Europe, life behind the “iron curtain” is associated with relatively fewer rights violations than life after the iron curtain’s fall. Comparative personal experiences will play a key role in explaining how these citizens conceptualize human rights. I test this argument by applying it to the cases of Poland, where I conducted a total of 68 randomly selected non-elite interviews in an effort to probe for key factors defining individuals’ conceptions of human rights.