GOVERNMENT PLANS to scrap the Human Rights Act will have far-reaching consequences for the black community’s ability to challenge racial injustice, experts predict.

Boris Johnson plans to pull Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights, which has formed the basis of many court victories where black Brits have challenged police brutality and wrongful convictions.

Critics of the government say a new British Bill of Rights predicts it will be far less effective upholding human rights in a systemically racist British justice system.

The Human Rights Act, which enshrines the European Human Rights Convention into UK law, offers a layer of protection especially those fighting cases against the state.

Human rights lawyer and poet David Neita said the changes would strip away an essential defence and expose people to abuse by the state.

He told The Voice: “Human rights, like the rule of law, provide a safe and equitable shelter for all human beings. 

“Any government that sets out to dismantle the protections offered by our human rights infrastructure is guilty of not only exposing the people they target to systematic abuse, but also rendering every person vulnerable and insecure within our social fabric, whilst demolishing the very foundations of a credible legal order.”

The European Convention, and the European Court of Human Rights which upholds the convention, has long been a bulwark against state power and has been used by families of death in custody victims to seek justice.  

The Convention was also crucial in holding the Home Office to account over the Windrush scandal.

More recently, lawyers advocating for potential asylum seekers were able to use the convention to ensure that around 130 of the migrants and refugees, who were due to be deported to Rwanda, remained in the UK.

The government has used the example of Rwanda as evidence as to why the Human Rights Act has to go, by linking the European court to Brexit even though it is completely separate from the EU.

An independent panel set up by the government last year found that there was ‘no case’ for reform of the Human Rights Act, but ministers led by Johnson and Dominic Raab want to press ahead regardless.

Media reports suggest Raab wants to push the major change through parliament without it being scrutinised by parliamentary committees. 

Freedoms

Dr Halima Begum, director of the Runnymede Trust, commented: “The Human Rights Act has played a fundamental role in progressing racial equality. 

“It guarantees that human rights and fundamental freedoms are applied without discrimination, and it has enabled people to secure their right simply to live without prejudice, and secure justice for those who were not afforded this right. 

“As an onslaught of racist legislation is set to become law, ethnic minority people in the UK face the most significant threat to their civil rights in recent memory.

“Overhauling our Human Rights Act would limit our ability to challenge things like Voter ID proposals, revoking citizenship for those with ties elsewhere, or deporting refugees to Rwanda against the public will.”

Dr Begum believes that a proposed Bill of Rights would dilute the protections for black and minority ethnic individuals and groups, and create new barriers denying them effective means to enforce those protections.

This would disproportionately hurt those communities who already have to fight for their rights, fight to belong, and fight to secure justice, and harm the UK’s reputation as a champion of equality and human rights.

Stefanie Alvarez, co-chair of Save Latin Village campaign and a pupil barrister at Imperium Chambers, outlined how the Human Rights Act had helped her own family as well as being a vital tool in the law she practices.

She said: “The Human Rights Act is one of the few laws that encapsulates all humans, regardless of their memberships, ethnicity, class or citizenship.

“I think back to when I arrived in the UK as a child refugee from Colombia in the year 2000 and how monumental the 1998 Act was for my family and I, having come from a country where conflict was rife and seeking asylum was detrimental to our lives.”

The government argues that the proposed British Bill of Rights would “restore a proper balance between the rights of individuals, personal responsibility and the wider public interest” but many have their doubts. 

Ministers say a new Bill of Rights will make it easier for the government to deport ‘foreign criminals’ by restricting the circumstances in which their right to family life would trump public safety and the need to remove them. 

Labour’s former shadow attorney general and self-styled ‘activist-lawyer’ Baroness Shami Chakrabati described the plans as “constitutional butchery”, while Amnesty International said it was a “full-frontal assault on our rights.”