IER report: Repeal of Human Rights Act will undermine whistleblowers

13 May 2016

Whistleblowers will lose the protection of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights – the Right to Expression – if the UK government repeals the Human Rights Act.

This is the analysis of Catherine Hobby, Senior Lecturer in Law in the School of Law and Social Sciences at the University of East London, in report she collated for the Institute of Employment Rights.

Hobby explains that Article 10 can be of benefit to whistleblowers in protecting their right to speak out about matters that are in the public’s interest, while employers are able to counter this by appealing to Article 8 – the right to respect for a private life – to claim embarrassing material should not be leaked.

The Conservative government plans to replace the Human Rights Act with a British Bill of Rights, although there has been a suspicious lack of justification for this move, with a Committee tasked to scrutinise the proposals recently reporting that the legislation appears to be “unnecessary”.

Read Hobby’s report here, and find out more about how human rights affect workers and how a British Bill of Rights could change workers’ protections at our conference in Liverpool next week.

Human Rights vs. Bill of Rights: What’s in it for workers?: Liverpool Thursday 19 May 2016 A one-day conference Conference Suite, Unite the Union NW Regional Office, Liverpool In 2014 the Conservatives announced they would scrap the Human Rights Act, withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights and introduce a new British Bill of Rights. More recently, Government chatter has focused on upgrading the Supreme Court into a “constitutional court” empowered to overrule EU laws, thereby ‘repatriating ’ rights back to the UK. Read more and book.