Human Rights and the “Hillsborough Law” tells the story of how the right to life, protected under the ECHR and the Human Rights Act, transformed the law and practice of effective public investigations in the UK.
Background
The Human Rights Act protects everyone’s rights and freedoms under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), including the right to life. It is because of the ECHR and the Human Rights Act that the state must not only safeguard life, but also properly investigate deaths at the hands of the state, or where the state appears to bear responsibility, to ensure full accountability when lives are lost.
After a long legal struggle to uncover the truth, the Hillsborough families were able to obtain verdicts of unlawful killing of their loved ones by relying on the ECHR through the Human Rights Act. Their campaign paved the way for the Public Office (Accountability) Bill, known as the “Hillsborough Law”, which creates a legal duty on public authorities to tell the truth, and a fairer and more equal system to protect the rights of bereaved people and survivors.
In this explainer
This explainer demonstrates how the Human Rights Act brought into UK law the rights and freedoms protected under the ECHR, including the right to life, and how this created a legal duty on the state to protect the right to life and to ensure effective investigations where the state might have failed in its primary duty to safeguard life. It also sets out the standards developed by the European Court of Human Rights and UK courts to ensure that investigations get to the truth, identify lessons to prevent future deaths, and treat bereaved families and survivors fairly.
The explainer describes how the incorporation of the ECHR right to life into UK law brought about important reforms to the scope of inquests, disclosure of evidence and legal aid, and how these changes shaped the fresh Hillsborough inquests. It also considers the continuing problems identified in the system and the proposed “Hillsborough Law”, which would create a statutory duty of candour and assistance for public authorities and officials and aims to achieve “parity of representation” for bereaved families. The Hillsborough Law has its origins in legal protection afforded to the right to life under the ECHR, brought into UK law through the Human Rights Act, and is designed to ensure that those rights are effectively protected in practice.
About the project
This is part of a series of explainers published through the project "Human Rights: Informing the UK Debate”, which aims to improve the quality of public discourse on human rights by providing expert content grounded in robust evidence and rigorous analysis. It seeks to identify and respond to inaccurate or misleading reporting or commentary about human rights. It also explores what human rights mean for ordinary people in their everyday lives, and for the values they care about such as security, dignity, accountability, democracy and national sovereignty.
The project is a collaboration between the Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre (University of Oxford), the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights (University of Oxford), and Middlesex University. The project is funded by a gift from the Sigrid Rausing Trust.
The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and not necessarily of the Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre, the University of Oxford or its funders.
