undermining your human rights

in the final stages of this month’s general election, Prime Minister Theresa May attempted to bolster her increasingly fragile position with another attack on human rights laws, a move that was rightly condemned by national and international human rights groups.

With coinsiderably less publicity, however, a United Nations report on human rights in the UK, published in May, provided a reminder that legislation, on its own, does not protect our fundamental rights. People acting together to protect these rights are just as important.

The limited press coverage of his report exploring freedoms of assembly and association in the UK picked up on wide-ranging concerns he expressed about the government’s draconian and increasingly untenable Prevent surveillance programme.

The context of these concerns, though, is a dismay at “the closing of space for civil society’ and the government’s negative view of organisations “that can and should hold it accountable.”

In contrast to dramatic announcements on scrapping human rights laws, the report says government efforts to undermine the space for civil society organisations “have been subtle and gradual, but they are as unmistakable as they are alarming”.

https://netpol.org/2017/06/14/un-human-rights-maina-kiai/