ABSTRACT
In the 2005 General Election campaign the Conservatives published a full-page advertisement directed at Gypsies and other travelling people arguing that 'too many people today seem to think they don't have to play by the rules and they are using so-called human rights to get away with doing the wrong thing'. The present batch of anti-Gypsy stories pedalled by the tabloids have about as much truth as did the abominable anti-Jew and anti-Gypsy stories peddled by the German press in the Nazi days. The press repeatedly rely on the Human Rights Act 1998. Any attempt to curtail their intrusions or output is met with by a bevy of lawyers cantering off to court to trot out their impassioned references to human rights. The European Convention on Human Rights was drafted as a legal bulwark to guard against any reoccurrence of the excesses that blighted the lives of minorities during the Second World War.
