The lawyer who helped draft Conservative plans for scrapping the Human Rights Act has urged politicians to publish the detailed proposals as early as possible.

Martin Howe QC, who has been a party parliamentary candidate, confirmed that a 40-page version of a draft new bill of rights is already in existence but cautioned that its eventual enactment will be a “complex and delicate” process.

Last October the then justice secretary, Chris Grayling, promised that the bill would be published before the election. It has still to appear.



The document is understood to be onto its seventh draft – a reflection of how much effort will be required to reconcile all the conflicting interests. A significant proportion of its text is understood to consist of sections incorporated from the European convention on human rights.

Because the draft bill was a Conservative party document and not a product of the coalition government, it could not be worked on by civil servants or official parliamentary draughtsmen before the election.

“I am very keen for the whole project to be taken forward,” Howe said. “I’m very pleased that it appears that human rights reform will be a high priority for the incoming government. It’s a complex and delicate area with sensitive issues. The purpose of the reforms is not to take away people’s rights but rather to protect our fundamental rights in a more sensible way. There’s a lot of practical working-through and thinking that needs to be done.”

Howe’s signalling of the sensitivity of the project implies that the bill may not be ready to go before parliament in its final form in the first session of the new parliament. A lengthy consultation process may be needed once the draft legislation is published. “The project needs to get going,” Howe said.

The British bill of rights, as it is known, will, according to the Tory manifesto “break the formal link between British courts and the European court of human rights”. Judgments from Strasbourg will, in effect, become advisory and the UK’s supreme court will become supreme.

Howe said the intention is to incorporate into UK legislation all the rights contained in the original European convention of human rights “rather than the doctrines accreted and embroidered by the European court of human rights in Strasbourg over the years”.

The British bill of rights will also incorporate Article 3 of the UN convention on torture which prevents anyone being deported to a state where there is a danger that they might be subject to torture.

Coordinating the way the new legislation interacts with exisiting convention rights that have already been written into the devolved assemblies will involve intricate changes that may have to be enacted simultaneously, Howe explained.

There is a precedent, however, he argued for different human rights standards across the separate jurisdictions within the United Kingdom: the Welsh assembly has incorporated the UN children’s convention into law whereas other parts of the country have not. “So you could have significantly different standards of human rights across the UK,” he said. “Some Australian states have different rights.”

Howe, who is an expert in intellectual property and EU law, was a member of the government’s commission on a bill of rights for the United Kingdom, which reported in December 2012 but failed to deliver a consensus. He said he assumed the government’s aim would be to initiate a period of public engagement and consultation over the draft legislation.

Human rights groups and the former attorney general, Dominic Grieve QC, have warned that if the UK effectively defies Strasbourg rulings, respect for the law will be undermined across Europe.