“A Bad Name in the Public Square”: Does it Matter What People Think about Human Rights?

2. On 2 February 2016, Justice Secretary Michael Gove gave evidence to the EU Justice SubCommittee. He was asked about the proposals to repeal the Human Rights Act 1998 and replace it with a Bill of Rights. Mr Gove was at pains to stress that the reforms would be “minimal”. This may surprise those who read Chris Grayling’s 2014 proposal, entitled, apparently without irony, Protecting Human Rights in the UK. At the time I described those proposals as “apocalypse soon”. This was only a slight exaggeration. The center-piece of the Grayling plan was to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, if the Council of Europe (CoE) refused to agree that its judgments would become “advisory” rather than binding on states, as is the current treaty commitment. In other words, make the CoE an offer it could only refuse. The CoE quickly responded that the proposal was “not consistent” with the ECHR. Britain leaving the Convention system, which it helped invent could, in human rights terms, be apocalyptic.