Human Rights Impact Report
From Democracywiki
Central Lobby
Report of the Human Rights Insight Project, January 2008
This report has the stated aim of finding out “whether human rights could be used empirically as a tool to improve the public’s experiences of public services and if so, how we in Government could encourage and facilitate this”. The report does not represent government policy, but is intended to stimulate discussion.
Press coverage of the report focused on the finding of one of the surveys quoted in the report that of 2000 people polled in 2004, 57% thought the Human Rights Act was being exploited (see for example this BBC report. Elsewhere in the report, a qualitative survey finds that some interviewees feel that the following groups are exploiting it:
• “immigrants and asylum seekers; • disruptive children in schools; • criminals trying to escape conviction ‘through a legal loophole’; • travellers; • celebrities; • people ‘hijacking’ a politically correct agenda for their own ends”. (p. 28)
The report includes data from several surveys, some of which date back to 2003, so it is difficult to know how accurate this data is currently.
The overarching conclusion that there is a substantial negative public perception of some elements of the Act, and also some confusion about what human rights are and how they can be enforced leads to a suggestion that there should be more targeted public education on the Act. There are also recommendations that public authorities should improve their engagement with it, which, it is suggested, would improve ‘consumer’ satisfaction with those authorities as well as indirectly improving public awareness.
One of the things that the report highlights as having worked well in improving public authorities’ staff awareness of human rights is training by the British Institute of Human Rights. Given the success of this model, our view is that perhaps this should be made available to many more authorities.
In our view, all of the recommendations seem fair in terms of addressing the recognised problem of a lack of accurate public awareness or ownership of human rights. There is now a need to tackle this problem as a matter of urgency, particularly given the forthcoming discussions on a British Bill of Rights – if the public are to participate meaningfully there must be an effort to ensure the public access high quality information on human rights.
