They were, because the charter provided for them. The Human Rights Act incorporated one set of provisions only, the European Convention on Human Rights, which goes back to just after the Second World War and which provides the classic political and civil rights. The other rights that we find in the charter, which is a much longer document and refers to socioeconomic rights, were not included in the Human Rights Act because they were not included in the European Convention on Human Rights.
The right-by-right analysis demonstrates which of these rights are not included. Given that the Government’s objective, as stated by the Prime Minister, is to ensure that the protections for people in this country are
the same the day after exit as the day before, I respectfully suggest that it is not for me to identify why that is not right; it is for the Government to demonstrate why it is. When we have substantial independent bodies such as the Bingham Centre and independent opinions from QCs demonstrating that actually it is not the case that the protections remain the same, the Government need to explain. I shall come on to that further.
Obviously there are examples of rights in the charter that reflect precisely other rights that we have within our law. In particular, there are a number of rights in the charter that are explicitly based on the European Convention on Human Rights; they are the same. Indeed, during the negotiations I went to some pains to try to ensure that they were phrased in the same way so as to prevent lawyers from saying, “It’s written differently so it must mean something different”. However, those are not the only rights that are there. As I noted at Second Reading, the charter is based not just on the European Convention on Human Rights but on principles of EU law and on principles that are commonly accepted by the member states, and those are in a different position from the ECHR rights.