Illegal according to EU law. Which the UK is trying so hard to break away from.

rwmj · on Dec 21, 2016

The Human Rights Act (1998) translates those rights into primary UK legislation.

Now the problem is that the current government is desperate to get rid of the HRA, because of a mixture of authoritarianism and ridiculous and often plain false tabloid stories about criminals supposedly getting away with crimes because of "human rights".

ngrybrt · on Dec 21, 2016

You're not wrong, but it's not just "tabloids".

There's a large part of the population that is very vocal against things like "basic human rights", and it's happening all over the world.

Doesn't matter if it is by ignorance or by political preference. I think we need to acknowledge that and take action before it's too late.

So far, politicians have taken the sane path, but I fear this is going away.

vidarh · on Dec 21, 2016

Thankfully, the current cabinet has at least one minister - David Davis, ironically in charge of Brexit, - that's been a firm defender of the HRA to the extent of in the past staking his position on it.

Now, if he's booted from or leaves cabinet, we should be worried as in that case it's a good sign May is about to take her authoritarianism one step further.

toyg · on Dec 21, 2016

David Davis is also one man with basically no power-base in the party. It's not a coincidence that he was handed the hottest seat in cabinet this time around, the one most likely to fail no matter what he does.

zigzigzag · on Dec 21, 2016

Actually, they want to replace it with a different bill, not eliminate it entirely.

The ECHR is quite problematic in a lot of ways. It would not be hard to do better.

isostatic · on Dec 21, 2016

Given the ECHR was drafted based on the work of British lawyers I'd like to see what we come up instead, certainly something that we can persuade everywhere else in Europe to sign up to.

Pulling out of it tells every tinpot wannabe dictator that it's perfectly fine not to sign up to basic human rights.