ABSTRACT
This book is intended to provide an analysis of the legal protection given to civil liberties in the UK.1 The term ‘civil liberties’ will be used to denote the broad class of rights often referred to as civil and political rights as they are recognised in the UK.2 In order to provide a coherent analysis, a theoretical position will be outlined from which to mount an internally consistent critique of the state of civil liberties and human rights in the UK today. This chapter will therefore aim to outline such a position in order to provide an account of a method of deriving rights from more general political theory and criticisms of this derivation; consideration of the nature of these rights and of methods of resolving confl icts between individual rights and the claims of society; and analysis of what we may be requiring of others when we assert a right or liberty.3 Broadly, the position adopted will tend to refl ect the particular brand of political liberalism expounded by John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, in so far as their theories converge. Perhaps it should be noted at this point that the liberal conception of rights which will be discussed differs signifi cantly from the tradition
which views rights as naturally inherent in the human person. By contrast, as will be seen, liberals start by devising a general political theory from which they then seek to derive a series of rights.
