Civil liberties in the United Kingdom

Civil liberties in the United Kingdom have a long and formative history. This is usually considered to have begun with Magna Carta of 1215, a landmark document in British constitutional history. Development of civil liberties advanced in common law and statute law in the 17th and 18th centuries, notably with the Bill of Rights 1689.[1] During the 19th century, working-class people struggled to win the right to vote and join trade unions. Parliament responded with new legislation, and attitudes to universal suffrage and liberties progressed further in the aftermath of the first and second world wars. Since then, the United Kingdom's relationship to civil liberties has been mediated through its membership of the European Convention on Human Rights. The United Kingdom, through Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, led the drafting of the Convention, which expresses a traditional civil libertarian theory.[2] It became directly applicable in UK law with the enactment of the Human Rights Act 1998.

The relationship between human rights and civil liberties is often seen as two sides of the same coin. A right is something you may demand of someone, while a liberty is freedom from interference by another in your presumed rights. However, human rights are broader. In the numerous documents around the world, they involve more substantive moral assertions on what is necessary, for instance, for "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", "to develop one's personality to the fullest potential" or "protect inviolable dignity". "Civil liberties" are certainly that, but they are distinctly civil, and relate to participation in public life. As Professor Conor Gearty writes,

Civil liberties is another name for the political freedoms that we must have available to us all if it to be true to say of us that we live in a society that adheres to the principle of representative, or democratic, government.[3]

In other words, civil liberties are the "rights" or "freedoms" which underpin democracy. This usually means the right to vote, the right to life, the prohibition on torture, security of the person, the right to personal liberty and due process of law, freedom of expression and freedom of association.[4]

Background

The Bill of Rights 1689 secured the supremacy of Parliament over the King, laying the foundations of representative democracy.

Enlightenment

Sir William Blackstone was the archetypal figure of the British Enlightenment, a legal scholar who in his Commentaries professed the liberty of citizens deriving from the Magna Carta and the common law.

Democracy

After selling her home, English activist Emmeline Pankhurst travelled constantly, giving speeches throughout Britain and the United States. One of her most famous speeches, Freedom or death, was delivered in Connecticut in 1913.

Post World War II

As well as being instrumental in drafting it, the United Kingdom signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights under Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin in 1950.
"We will do our best to see that our decisions are in conformity with it. But it is drawn in such vague terms that it can be used for all sorts of unreasonable claims and provoke all sorts of litigation. As so often happens with high-sounding principles, they have to be brought down to earth. They have to be applied in a work-a-day world."

In response to this judgment the UK parliament passed the Contempt of Court Act 1981.

1980s

Margaret Thatcher oversaw a gradual tightening of security legislation to crack down on industrial protests and the Provisional IRA.
The Brighton Hotel Bombing by the Provisional Irish Republican Army to coincide with the Conservative Party conference preceded a sterner approach to security legislation

1990s

Tony Blair and then-U.S. President George W. Bush both introduced rafts of new security legislation as a reaction to terrorism after the September 11, 2001 attacks and the Iraq War.

21st century

See also

Notes

  1. "Britain's unwritten constitution". British Library. Retrieved 27 November 2015. The key landmark is the Bill of Rights (1689), which established the supremacy of Parliament over the Crown.... The Bill of Rights (1689) then settled the primacy of Parliament over the monarch’s prerogatives, providing for the regular meeting of Parliament, free elections to the Commons, free speech in parliamentary debates, and some basic human rights, most famously freedom from ‘cruel or unusual punishment’.
  2. see e.g. the Praemble to the Convention, which states the Convention is there to secure "effective political democracy".
  3. Conor Gearty, Civil Liberties (2007) Clarendon Law Series, Oxford University Press, p.1
  4. Care should be taken with such definitions. Much more "underpins" democracy than civil and political rights. Capacity for public participation goes into the social and economic: see, e.g. Jeremy Waldron, 'Social Citizenship and the Defence of Welfare Provision' (1993) in Liberal Rights: Collected papers 1981-91, Cambridge University Press, Ch.12; Also, the language of rights, liberties, freedoms, etc, etc, is inherently vague and the divisions between different rights in various documents are inevitably meaningless (e.g. is the right to liberty different from a fair trial, and does it matter?), and simply express country's cultural and historical preferences. At the core all these things come down to the mediation of relations between people, whether for power or resources or between individuals or the state. See, e.g. Alan Gewirth, Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Applications (1982); he puts forth the formula that any right can be put in the form of X claiming right Y against Z
  5. "Charles I and the Petition of Right". UK Parliament.
  6. (1882) 9 QBD 308, 313-4; Compare now, Hammond v Director of Public Prosecutions [2004] EWHC 69 (Admin), where a homophobic preacher in Bournemouth was arrested for breach of peace after people started pushing and throwing water over him; and Redmond-Bate v Director of Public Prosecutions [1999] Crim Law Rev, where Fundamentalist Christians preaching on Cathedral steps, attracting 100 stirred up people were removed for "breach of the peace". Sedley LJ held that in contravention to Art.11 ECHR and Beatty
  7. see, Taff Vale case, Quinn v Leatham and South Wales Mines; the first of these was the direct cause for the formation of the Labour Party: to lobby for its reversal.
  8. Although clearly these cases are anachronistic to the highest degree and moribundly conservative, political donations by unions and business alike; see for instance the Companies Act 2006 ss.362-379.
  9. (1984) 7 EHRR 14, 79
  10. [1990] 1 A.C. 109, at p. 283G
  11. Security and Privacy, The Guardian, 19 July 2001
  12. "Secret trial plan for English court". BBC News. 4 June 2014.
  13. "https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/guardian-v-ab-cd.pdf" (PDF). www.judiciary.gov.uk. Retrieved 2015-04-17. External link in |title= (help)

References

Historical
General

External links

Human Rights Act 1998
European Convention on Human Rights
Other
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