Judicial Reasoning under the UK Human Rights Act: The European Convention on Human Rights and the Human Rights Act: the view from the outside

Introduction When, in the Human Rights Centre, we were first contemplating the ways in which cases under the Human Rights Act (HRA) were being (and should have been) disposed of, it was clear that we had different, in some cases, quite different, conceptions of what the HRA was about and what we could expect from UK judges in applying it. These differences were not restricted to more or less liberal views about what human rights were, or how human rights should be protected in the UK, but about whether the HRA was just another example of a domestic statute implementing the UK's treaty obligations or whether it had the capacity to go beyond the protection of a minimal/minimum understanding of human rights and fundamental freedoms as protected by the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) to provide some substitute for the ‘missing’ Bill of Rights in the British constitution. I approach this matter as an international lawyer, and I take it that, at least, ‘Bringing Rights Home’ meant improving UK co-operation with the ECHR system by providing a better means for resolving disputes about the meaning and application of the ECHR in the UK legal system.