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London Review of Books

Colonels in Horsehair subscriber-only content

Stephen Sedley examines the realtionship between human rights legislation and the judiciary

  • Sceptical Essays on Human Rights edited by Tom Campbell and K.D. Ewing

The United Kingdom is a good place in which to assemble a book of sceptical essays about human rights, but was 2001 a good year in which to do it? True, by then Scotland and Wales had operative devolution statutes which obliged their Governments to observe the European Convention on Human Rights in all they did; and some interesting decisions had already been thrown up north of the border. But the big one, the UK’s Human Rights Act, although enacted in 1998, had been put on a slow fuse to enable the country to get ready for it, and it was not until October 2000 that it was brought into force.

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Stephen Sedley is a lord justice of appeal for England and Wales and president of the British Institute for Human Rights. He gave the 2007 Mishcon lecture at University College London under the delphic title ‘Bringing Rights Home: Time to Start a Family?’