Protect Our Human Rights
On global Human Rights Day, as the UK joins the international Summit for Democracy, NDTi stands with over 150 groups across the UK to urge the Prime Minister to take action to secure our Human Rights Act
As the UK gears up for President Biden’s Summit for Democracy on 9-10 December, over 150 groups have issued an open letter to the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, challenging him to secure our Human Rights Act and safeguard human rights and democratic accountability here at home.
The organisations include those working with children, carers, people with learning disabilities and mental ill-health, women experiencing violence, migrants, older people, and groups campaigning for LGBTQ+ rights, fair trials, access to justice, decent housing and against racial discrimination and to increase the UK’s democratic accountability. In our varied work up and down the country, we see the everyday ways our Human Rights Act helps people to live more dignified and equal lives; ordinary people whose voices are too often unheard by those with power.
The loud calls to tamper with our Human Rights Act, often by those in government with the responsibility to uphold our protections, does little to reassure civil society groups, and the many people we each support and represent. We note that this week Justice Secretary Dominic Raab restated his intention to consult on the future of our law imminently, despite not yet having published the report of the Independent Review of the Human Rights Act.
This atmosphere of hostility towards human rights and legal accountability in the UK cannot continue. Together, we are calling on the Prime Minister, and leaders of all political parties, to “move from the romanticisation of being human rights pioneers in 1948 and commit to our Human Rights Act protections being a part of everyone’s life, every day, today and tomorrow.”