The Commission on a Bill of Rights has duly reported (and as I began to write this post Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, who resigned from the Commission on the grounds that it was too much in favour of the status quo, was being interviewed on the Radio 4 Today programme in advance of publication).

As widely expected, the Commission’s report is fairly bland: unsurprisingly, given that half its members were nominated by the Conservatives and half by the Liberal Democrats and given also that the two parties are pretty well diametrically opposed on the issue. Only six of the eight Commissioners want a “British Bill of Rights”: Helena Kennedy and Philippe Sands disagree with their colleagues (though that is a higher level of agreement than one might have predicted).

As a general point on which, presumably, the Commissioners all agree, the Report urges HMG to maintain the momentum of the Brighton Declaration and to continue to press for the fundamental reforms of the European Court of Human Rights called for in the Commission’s interim advice (Overview, paragraph 109).

The Report’s premises

The report begins with four preliminary points: Continue reading →