A Human Rights Bill for Scotland

We welcomed positive steps to build on the UK’s legal human rights protections with the Human Rights Act as a blueprint and a foundation. There is a real opportunity for the Scottish Government to show human rights leadership here and to change the political narrative to positively reflect the true nature of the legal framework that has improved innumerable lives in innumerable ways. 

However, we also raised concerns about the long and complicated nature of the consultation that excluded many people from participating and meant that even legal experts struggled to respond.

BIHR’s work has always been informed by what the Human Rights Act means for people in their everyday lives. We incorporate co-production and experience-informed research into our policy work to ensure that any conversations about human rights have people’s real-life
experiences at the heart of them. However, we were not been able to work directly with people with lived experience to create a formal consultation response in this instance, largely due to the length and complexity of the consultation questions. We therefore opted to respond through a letter that included real-life examples from our work.

We encouraged the Scottish Government to take this opportunity to reinforce its commitment to the Human Rights Act by explicitly stating on the face of the Bill that it is intended to be read in conjunction with and build on the Human Rights Act.

It is therefore essential that the proposed Bill does not cause further confusion or conflict with the Human Rights Act on who has duties to uphold human rights. Proper funding and structure must be put in place to provide training and ongoing support for those responsible for upholding human rights. This means that not just frontline practitioners but people working across all aspects of public bodies should be supported to understand their duties at all levels, from frontline decisions right through to strategy and service design.

There needs to be adequate funding provision for advocacy services and practical resources and/or training and ongoing support in place to support advocates and advisors. We recommended that the Scottish Government undertakes a participatory process with these services to plan how support will be delivered. The Scottish Government also needs to raise awareness and provide funding and information to support individuals to understand and claim their human rights.

We would like to better understand how providers and CQC will enforce the new right and what any changes will mean in practice. In particular, individuals should have recourse to CQC when their rights are not being upheld and any restrictions on non-absolute rights should be justified to individuals and their loved ones as well as CQC, following the three-stage test in the Human Rights Act.