While the Conservative manifesto promised to ‘update’ the Act, the details are not known. An independent Human Rights Act review is yet to report. As a backbench MP, however, Raab said he opposed the Act and didn’t believe in economic and social rights.
Giving the example of a ‘drug dealer convicted of beating his ex-partner, a man who hadn’t paid maintenance for his daughter’, who then successfully claimed the right to family life to avoid deportation, Raab said: ‘We’ve got to bring this nonsense to an end…we will overhaul the Human Rights Act, to end this kind of abuse…and restore some common sense to our justice system’.
However, human rights lawyer Shoaib Khan, principal, SMK Law, has since tweeted the case involved a 20-year-old who came to the UK aged three, had close family in the UK, showed little risk of returning to his drug offences, was remorseful and was a caring father according to evidence from his ex-partner. Khan said the case is ten years old and the law has since changed.
Raab confirmed plans to fit some offenders with ‘sobriety tags’, and announced a £30m investment to ‘make streets safer at night’ and introduce a 24/7 rape and violence hotline.
The Bar Council has warned that an extra £2.48bn is needed to return the justice system (excluding police funding) to the levels of 2010, before a decade of cuts to the justice budget began. The calculation, in its Spending Review submission, comes after official statistics showed a rise to more than 60,000 outstanding Crown Court cases during the second quarter of 2021.
Responding, Shadow Justice Secretary David Lammy said: ‘After 11 years of Tory government, court backlogs have reached record levels, violence and self-harm in prisons have soared, rape convictions have plummeted, and many women have lost confidence in the criminal justice system.
‘Yet instead of addressing any of these problems, the new justice secretary chose to focus on vague threats to take away ordinary people’s rights.’
