ABSTRACT
The Labour Government came to power in 1997 with a manifesto that promised a radical programme of constitutional change and, most signifi cantly, the introduction of the Human Rights Act 1998 as the means of receiving the European Convention on Human Rights into domestic law, nearly 50 years after it was signed. Finally, rights were, in the government’s words, to be ‘brought home’.2 It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that the advent of the HRA appeared at the time to herald a new dawn for civil liberties. Relief seemed to be at hand, after many years of seeing the country condemned at Strasbourg and elsewhere, during the Conservative years, for its human rights’ record. Ronald Dworkin said, famously, of the Thatcher years,
‘Liberty is ill in Britain’.Ewing and Gearty wrote in 1989: ‘It should now be clear that civil liberties in Britain are in a state of crisis’.4 There were expectations that the HRA would prove to be something akin to a panacea for all that was wrong with fundamental freedoms in Britain or, at the least, commentators perceived that civil liberties had been re-energised. With the creation of positive rights, there was a sense of a break with the erosions of liberty of the Conservative years.5
