Today the Labour Campaign for Human Rights has launched the Our Human Rights campaign, showing who will lose out if the Tories follow through on their threats to repeal the Human Rights Act and take us out of the European Convention on Human Rights.
It shows how human rights make a real difference in the lives of people all across the country, from elderly people fearing abuse in care homes and women suffering sexual violence to people with disabilities and vulnerable children. These are the people who the Tories will hurt if they go ahead with their plans. As Patrick Stewart says in a message of support for our campaign, the Tories are trying to launch a ‘senseless attack on people who need help.’
As I have worked on this campaign over the last few months, I have read a lot of stories and spoken to many people in an effort to understand how our seemingly arcane human rights framework impacts on people’s lives. One story in particular stands out. Earlier this year two victims of a serial rapist, John Worboys, took the police to court over their failure to investigate their rape allegations and won. Their case was brought under the HRA.
Worboys is perhaps Britain’s most prolific sex offender. He became known as the ‘black cab rapist’. Before he was eventually caught, he picked up women in a taxi, drugged them, and raped them. There were over a hundred victims. And yet when the two women in the recent case took their allegations to the police, they were not properly investigated. It is a story that is still all too common.
For the two women, the HRA was the last resort. They used it to challenge the police’s decision and get justice. Without it, there would have been no case. For me, their case perfectly exemplifies the important role our human rights protections play. They give every person the ability to take on powerful institutions and get bad decisions and policies reversed.
There are many other examples – the children who took out a case against their local authority after they were abused by successive foster carers, the people who used the HRA to ban restraint techniques in young offenders’ institutions that had led to child deaths, the workers who took a case to the European Court of Human Rights challenging a blatant attempt to strip them of their trade union rights. The list goes on.
Some people say human rights are irrelevant in an election year. But this is Labour’s bread and butter – standing up for women’s rights, for workers, for vulnerable children. The Tories will try to claim human rights do not benefit ordinary people, but the stories we have found paint a different picture. The challenge now is getting the message out to the public.
The Our Human Rights campaign shows there is a broad coalition of people and groups who wish to protect human rights – politicians, unions, celebrities, victims, human rights organisations, lawyers. Labour has many allies in this fight and we should feel confident enough to mount a robust defence of the HRA and ECHR when the Tories try and make it an election issue.
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Andrew Noakes is chair of the Labour Campaign for Human Rights
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