The blog Pickled Politics has called for the controversial Human Rights Act to be repealed:
“Britain has the longest pre-charge detention period in the world, at 28 days, which was brought in after the HRA was introduced. Nor did the HRA protect us when the Blair government tried to introduce a 90 day limit, and it won’t protect us when Gordon Brown attempts to raise the limit to 42 days….
“Peaceful protesters have been harassed and threatened with arrest, especially under the catch-all clause of anti-terrorism, even if the protest has nothing to do with terrorism and is not the slightest bit violent.”
They also look into other issues, such as the growing use of CCTV, the use of anti-terror laws to access peoples’ personal data (as I’ve mentioned in a previous post) and of course the imposition of the hated identity card scheme.
The HRA has been the most widely discussed, and arguably, the most misunderstood law to have been introduced into the UK. It is clear for the that the government, their agencies and local councils are repeatedly breaking the law, and people who have been wronged in anyway should in theory take them to court, but mostly it doesn’t happen as many are often put off by the high cost of doing so.
The only way to deal with such high-level abuses of the HRA is for the people to demand our so-called parliamentarians introduce a legally-binding, written constitution and a proper bill of rights. There should a proper relationship between the government and the citizens, and the state should be told never to intervene in areas where they have no right to enter.
The Human Rights Act should not be repealed, but the benefits should be given wider publicity, and the down-trodden citizens of this country should be allowed to challenge the authority of the government whenever they get their policies wrong.