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Non Fiction

Human Rights for the Non-Lawyer

Inspiration

In the spring of 2006, I was walking along Embankment, past the Oxo Tower, on my way to work, when I was suddenly struck by a thought. Human rights get a pretty bad press in this country. You'd have thought protections that guarantee that your government can't silence you for political dissent, kill you for practising the "wrong" religion, or stop you marrying the person you love, would be fairly well supported in this country. But they aren't.

To listen to the popular right-wing press, human rights laws exist to enable terrorists and paedophiles to operate unimpeded, for lawyers to get rich on, and to persecute the "man in the street".

It occurred to me that a major failing of human rights law is getting the message across to the non-lawyer. There are a myriad human rights books aimed at law students, solicitors, police officers. People involved in the law. But where is the guide for the average person? When a popular newspaper like the Sun doesn't even realise that the European Convention on Human Rights has nothing to do with the European Union, then can we expect the average person to have a better understanding of a field of law that can be both very technical, and very esoteric?

The book

The book will explain where our human rights laws come from, covering both international and domestic law. It will cover theories of international law, domestic law, rights theory etc, before looking at the specific sources of human rights law in treaty and domestic legislation. Finally, it will focus on specific human rights cases, and controversial incidents that are alleged to have been about human rights by the press.

Current status

At the research stage.