Leaving the ECHR is only half the battle
The Conservative party has decided to repeal the Human Rights Act and to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) – the international treaty whose rights the act was intended to ‘bring home’. The harder decision is what, if anything, should serve as a replacement. One fashionable proposal is that we should now have a British Bill of Rights that reproduces the Convention. That might reassure voters that any desirable protections survive, but it could also reproduce the very uncertainty that made withdrawal from the treaty attractive. Subtraction, without more, might not amount to improvement, and copying the same rights into a new statute may lead to problems.
