ABSTRACT
In writing this book, I have not set out to offer a normative assessment of whether it was the ‘right thing’ for Canada to enact the Charter of Rights and Freedoms 1982, for New Zealand to enact the Bill of Rights Act 1990, or for the United Kingdom to enact the Human Rights Act 1998. As an outsider, and without a more comprehensive examination of the evaluative research and scholarship which has been produced in Canada over more than two decades,1 and which is emerging in the UK2 and to a lesser extent, New Zealand,3 to have embarked on any such exercise would have been, to say the least, presumptuous. Nor has it been my aim to produce a general theory of the relationship between legal form and respect for human rights. Even if this were considered possible or desirable, a four-country examination of three human rights controversies would clearly provide an inadequate foundation for such a task.
