Human Rights Act 1998

Abstract

Human rights were first defined after the second world war in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948 which was followed by the UK’s commitment to the European Convention on Human Rights in 1951. The Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA) was one of the first pieces of legislation the new Labour Government enacted and came into force on 2 October 2000. It enables human rights to be directly enforced in UK courts and provides the bedrock for all new legislation to be HRA compliant.