Political assault on human rights is a ‘dangerous’ attack on UK autonomy, says HRW director

The British govt’s competitive politicisation of human rights is a deadly attack on autonomy that will have to be halted ahead of irrevocable injury is completed, the United Kingdom director of Human Rights Attend to (HRW) has warned.

In an unique interview with the Dad or mum, Yasmine Ahmed, who has been the United Kingdom director of HRW since November 2020, stated the federal government indicating it might “disapply” the Human Rights Occupation to an disaster invoice that can permit it to ship asylum seekers to Rwanda – in spite of the very best courtroom ruling the coverage unlawful – is a part of an escalating assault on human rights.

“With previous governments there was always an attempt to at least try to appear as if they were complying with domestic or international human rights law and to respect the courts and human rights institutions,” Ahmed stated. “Now there is no attempt to do this – in fact, it’s quite the opposite.”

She endured: “Rishi Sunak’s government must know that even scrapping the Human Rights Act will not prevent it from facing significant legal barriers to its Rwanda policy, but what we’re seeing is the UK moving towards a place where the government feels it can undermine the integrity of the judiciary, undermine or scrap human rights laws that don’t serve its current political agenda, and create new laws that do. This is a dangerous place to find ourselves in. This can start to look very much like authoritarianism.”

Ahmed says that since she took up the United Kingdom directorship of Human Rights Attend to 3 years in the past, the federal government has introduced an extraordinary assault on human rights enshrined in British and global regulation.

“Not only is the government talking about ripping up domestic human rights law and ignoring its international obligations, it has launched an open attack on the right to peacefully demonstrate, is locking up climate protesters, criminalising refugees and has given the police unprecedented powers over citizens,” Ahmed stated.

“This approach not only discredits and undermines our ability to hold other human rights violators to account on the international stage, but it creates a model of governance that puts political ideology over a state’s legal obligation to uphold basic human rights that were put into law to protect us all. Once you attack, discredit and tear up these laws and frameworks it could be almost impossible to put them back together.”

She says that during contemporary weeks, makes an attempt to restrain pro-Palestinian protests “ by the former home secretary Suella Braverman and the government’s attacks on the supreme court’s ruling that its Rwanda asylum policy is illegal shows how emboldened the state has become in showing contempt for human rights.

“They have been successful in making us believe that ripping up human rights laws and putting new ones in place will only affect vulnerable and controversial groups,” she stated. “But all of us, at any time, may need to exercise our rights or hold the state to account and suddenly discover that we have lost the power to do so.”