Merris Amos talks to us about her new book Human Rights Law published by Hart publishing.
The Third Edition of my book Human Rights Law examines, over almost 800 pages, all aspects of the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA). For those not familiar with it, this is the law that gives further effect to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in national law. The book is in two parts: Part I covers the procedural issues such as who can bring a claim, the meaning of ‘public authority’, the relationship between UK courts and the European Court of Human Rights, and how the Convention rights apply to Acts of Parliament; Part II provides a detailed examination of the interpretation and application of the Convention rights by UK courts. Over the last 20 years national judges have delivered a lot of HRA judgments and there is now a definite ‘UK flavour’ to our human rights law.
My association with the HRA has been a long one. Towards the end of the last century, when I had first moved to London from Sydney, I worked for Anthony Lester in the House of Lords. One of his areas of expertise was securing the incorporation of the ECHR into UK law. This was very entertaining until 1997 when Tony Blair became Prime Minister and the Labour Party’s promise to incorporate became a reality and we both became very busy.
I was there for the parliamentary debates and all of the excitement, optimism and hope that the HRA would encourage a culture of human rights, and that there would be a drastic improvement in the ability of ordinary people to hold the state to account. I eventually left the House of Lords and moved on to the University of Westminster, then the University of Essex. In 2006 The First Edition was published joining an already crowded market. I had waited, maybe a little too long, but I wanted the book to be national in focus and as up to date as possible. My family was proud although I was not our first published author. After a long career in the motor industry, at 81 years of age my Dad published the children’s book Fireman Jack about a boy who has an accident in a pedal car. We tied for sales in the first year of publication.
By this time the initial optimism about the HRA had faded. The events of September 11, 2001, had occurred and the Labour government had turned on its creation. Home Secretary, David Blunkett, warned judges to stop applying the HRA in ways which ‘thwarted the government’s plans’ and the Conservative Party positioned itself as opposed to the HRA given it was an ‘obstacle to protecting the lives of British citizens.’ In 2006 it promised to repeal the HRA and replace it with a potentially watered down ‘British’ Bill of Rights.
Although there was a serious chance that there would be no HRA by the time of publication, I continued with the Second Edition which was published in 2014. Shortly after the Conservative Party published its plans for repeal should it win the 2015 General Election and I started to reposition my scholarly profile to ‘legal historian’. These years were very difficult for the HRA. The debate was a difficult one and required endless affirmation that the HRA was important to the lives of ordinary people; that international supervision from a human rights court was valuable; and that the state was definitely not interested in making itself more accountable with a better bill of rights. The day before the Brexit referendum was a despondent one. Most believed that the vote would be to remain and that the resulting sacrifice would be the HRA and the UK’s membership of the ECHR system.
With the HRA safe, for the time being, a third edition seemed a feasible project. But, in addition to the never-ending prospect that my subject of study will disappear, there are other barriers to textbook writing not least families, puppies, pandemics and the fact that that textbooks cannot be submitted to the REF. I wondered whether it was worth it. Key to my decision to press ahead was my discovery that a market once saturated with books about the HRA has dried up. This time around I found the process strangely soothing. I recognised passages from the Second Edition in various judgments. I sat, Virginia Woolf-like, at a ‘pandemic inspired’ tiny desk for long periods but soon the calm turned to an extraordinary pain in my right shoulder. I told myself it was due to all those years of playing tennis. The professional diagnosis was it was all those months of sitting down.
As I contemplate the possibility of a fourth edition, once again the decision may be taken from me. The Independent Review of the HRA has completed its work and will release its report at the end of October. Whatever reform is proposed, it is unlikely to be a simple repeal and replace but a long process of tiny technical amendments which may eventually turn the HRA into a shadow of its former self. Whatever happens, I have learned a lot. National human rights law crosses all jurisdictions and I can pontificate so confidently about the proportionality of confiscation orders that the guests later ask the host what I was convicted of. As I tell our students, for most it is not possible to simply practice human rights law but a knowledge of the fundamentals is invaluable and can be applied to almost anything.
In more peaceful moments, I see human rights law and the book as a collection of stories - usually tragic stories about something terrible and a person, or a family’s, search for some sort of justice and I hope that if I keep on writing, I will have made some small contribution to them finding it.
Human Rights Law Third Edition, by Merris Amos, (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2021) 769 pp. +cix, paperback £49.99, hardback £81.00, eBook £35.99