How Britain can reassert its commitment to the value of equality - Paul Johnson, Lord Cashman & Lord Lexden

It is not an exaggeration to say that the key premise of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 – that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights – is under sustained attack by those who thrive on furthering inequality in our society. At the heart of this attack is the deplorable practice of dehumanising particular people based on their personal characteristics.

The UK’s legal framework for dealing with inequality and discrimination is creaking under the weight of the culture wars. Legislation, such as the Equality Act 2010 and the Human Rights Act 1998, designed to protect the most marginal and vulnerable in society has become weaponised by those who seek to promote exclusion and social division.

At a time of rising discrimination, the UK needs to reassert its commitment to the value of equality and it has a very easy and powerful way of doing this: it should sign up to Protocol 12 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

Protocol 12, which has been in force since 2005, extended the scope of protection against discrimination under the ECHR by creating a general prohibition of discrimination and a free standing right not to be discriminated against. States that commit to the Protocol guarantee that no one shall be discriminated against on any ground by any public authority.

Protocol 12 has been signed by 37 of the current 46 member states of the Council of Europe, and ratified by 20 of those member states. However, the UK has neither signed nor ratified the Protocol and, as a result, individuals in the UK have significantly less protection under the ECHR from discrimination than those in other European countries, such as Finland, the Netherlands and Spain.

After Protocol 12 was opened for signature Parliament’s all-party Joint Committee on Human Rights repeatedly recommended that the UK government should sign up to it, but the government refused. The view of the Joint Committee was that the government’s refusal to sign and ratify the Protocol was unwarranted and amounted to a failure to give sufficient effect in national law to the UK’s international human rights obligations.

Successive governments have given various reasons over many years for their opposition to Protocol 12, one being a concern that the European Court of Human Rights will apply the Protocol in unpredictable ways. This concern is hardly justified in light of the Court having given only a handful of judgments on the Protocol over the last 20 years, in which it has utilised its long-standing and highly predictable methodology to assess whether any discrimination complained of had an objective and reasonable justification.

Professor Paul Johnson OBE is Executive Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Leeds; Michael Cashman CBE is a former Labour MEP and a non-affiliated peer of the House of Lords; Alistair Lexden OBE is a Conservative peer and a Deputy Speaker of the House of Lords.