Former Lord Chief Justice Lord Woolf has warned that scrapping the Human Rights Act could bring about \u201cdangers\u201d including a deluge of new cases brought by \u201ccreative\u201d lawyers who seek to create \u201careas of disrepute\u201d in the legal system.<\/p>\n
Woolf told the Lord\u2019s EU Justice Sub-Committee that current European human rights laws bring \u201cclarity<\/em>\u201d to issues, which will all be negated if the act is abandoned.<\/p>\n He said the move would lead to \u201cexpense<\/em>\u201d as courts are forced to renegotiate human rights issues.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the things that should be taken into account before we have determined what we are going to do is the dangers inevitably involved in this,\u201d<\/em> Woolf said.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is expense, uncertainty, anxiety of litigants \u2014 and for what? What counterbalance is there?<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cIt is inevitable that we\u2019re going to lose the benefits that we have got \u2014 the clarity and certainty from a large number of cases that have already been dealt with.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n The Conservative government is expected to release details in the coming weeks of the British Bill of Rights, designed to replace the Human Rights Act. The bill would mean British courts no longer answer to European courts and would rein in the abuse of existing legislation.<\/p>\n However, it is not clear how the bill will affect Britain\u2019s links with the European Convention on Human Rights, which is a separate treaty from other European courts.<\/p>\n \u201cAny change of the substantial nature that is now proposed will create positions of uncertainty,<\/em>\u201d Woolf added.<\/p>\n \u201cSince the Human Rights Act was passed there\u2019s been a number of cases in this country and in Strasbourg and we have the benefit of those decisions.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cThey enable people to identify what are the rights of individuals and what are the limits of those rights, because they have clarity.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cOnce we provide an entirely new situation that whole game has to be re-started and lawyers are going to think of ways of creating all sorts of areas of dispute, which will then have to be clarified either in our own courts or in the Court of Justice or the European Court, unless we\u2019ve taken away the right to apply to the European Court.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Chairwoman of the committee Baroness Kennedy said Woolf was the first person who had expressed the financial dangers of repealing the Human Rights Act.<\/p>\n \u201cPerhaps we should have this in mind when government considers it,\u201d<\/em> she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Via RT<\/a>.\u00a0This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission or license.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Former Lord Chief Justice Lord Woolf has warned that scrapping the Human Rights Act could bring about \u201cdangers\u201d including a deluge of new cases brought by \u201ccreative\u201d lawyers who seek to create \u201careas of disrepute\u201d in the legal system. Woolf told the Lord\u2019s EU Justice Sub-Committee that current European human rights laws bring \u201cclarity\u201d to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":199003,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-199063","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199063\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/199003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}