What Will Be Its Effect?

Will there be a flood of litigation arising out of the Act? Of course there will! The late, great Joseph Jackson QC said that every piece of important new legislation meant ten years of work for the legal profession. The Daily Mail called it a Charter for Crackpots. If one of the main advantages of the Act is, as the government has described it, bringing human rights home, what are the lessons to be learnt from the past 50 years? There have been 50 cases – averaging about one a year – in which the Court in Strasbourg has found the United Kingdom to be in breach of Convention rights. Even one breach was one too many, but it does not indicate that such breaches are so rife that our own courts will be inundated by claims against the government. Of much more concern will be allegations that the courts, as official bodies, have failed to implement the rights of those appearing before them. It is a paradox that in applying an Act which on the face of it is concerned with the remedies of individuals against public bodies the courts will be primarily concerned with the application of those rights between individuals.