ABSTRACT
The Human Rights Act 1998, which became fully operational on 2 October 2000, incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into our domestic law. Many lawyers considered the 1998 Act to be one of the most significant events in the history of English law. Others doubted this, claiming that it would be a damp squib. After all, they said, we are already familiar with the provisions of the Convention; indeed the United Kingdom ratified it many years ago in 1951. But, as this chapter will endeavour to demonstrate, the doubters will assuredly be proved wrong – the Human Rights Act will have a dramatic and far reaching effect on all existing and future law.
