GHT Homepage News MPs Urge More Rights for All

MPs Urge More Rights for All
18th Aug 2008

21st century Bill of Rights urged by Joint Committee of Human Rights might open up rights to decent housing, health care for all and benefits and right to work for destitute refused asylum seekers

Britain could create the "glue" to reunite a divided society and set out its future aspirations by embracing a bill of rights which goes much further than existing rights to embrace positive social and economic freedoms, a group of MPs and peers told ministers yesterday.

"A UK bill of rights and freedoms would be a constitutional landmark. It would provide a framework both for protecting the liberty of the individual against the intrusion of state power, and for protecting the 'little person' against powerful interests," the committee's chairman, Andrew Dismore MP, explained yesterday.

right to decent housing, and health care for all
Such a move could open up the gradual prospect of individuals - especially the "vulnerable and marginalised" - being able to go to court to enforce the right to decent housing, health care or education for a child with special needs.

benefits for refused asylum seekers
It might also prevent failed asylum seekers being denied benefits as is currently official policy, the joint Lords-Commons committee on human rights (JCHR) says in a new report. Such changes might help offset "the popular misconception that human rights are a charter for criminals and terrorism".

The committee, chaired by Labour's Dismore, is aware of the political sensitivities involved. Any proposal that might give greater power to courts to allocate public resources - money or services - would be seen as infringing the prerogative of elected ministers and MPs. So the JCHR's remedy would allow court rulings to be merely influenced by a new "underpinning" of human rights - rather than create "directly enforceable duties," the report explains.

The committee, which monitors a range of human rights issues, opposes suggestions that right should be conditional on good behaviour, though it does propose inclusion of "civic duty" to fellow citizens.

It also rejects ministerial suggestions that the bill of rights ideas now being discussed within Gordon Brown's government - a process being led by Jack Straw, the justice minister - should be called the British bill of rights. So as to include Northern Ireland it should be a UK bill of rights and freedoms.

But the scope envisaged by the JCHR would embrace new areas of international human rights and contain the specific guarantee of the right to asylum. It would also include the right to "a healthy and sustainable environment" - the kind of aspiration that might tilt a court ruling more positively in that direction.

Historically, rights have been largely focused on the legal and political kind that include freedom of speech, access to justice and the ballot box - as well as "negative freedoms" such as those from arbitrary arrest and imprisonment or religious persecution. The Dismore committee wants the government - or an incoming Tory government, which has also promised a bill of rights - to build on "positive freedoms" of the kind first expounded by the US president Franklin Roosevelt as part of his Four Freedoms in 1941.

source
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/aug/11/constitution.humanrights