The UK Governments current proposals for reform of the Human Rights Act 1998 are in equal measure unsurprising and astonishing

I began teaching a module on Human Rights Protection in the UK at Strathclyde Law School in 2009. In the first year, and every year teaching it thereafter, I opened the first seminar with a discussion of historian A.W. Brian Simpson’s magisterial book, Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention on Human Rights (2001). Simpson illuminates the fraught relationship between the UK and the European Convention on Human Rights, and the perspective amongst some that human rights essentially related to foreign affairs since they were sufficiently protected in Britain, the true home of liberty.