Integrated Implementation of Scotland's New Human Rights Framework : Workshop Series Findings

Webster, Elaine and Busby, Nicole and Miller, Alan and Shields, Sophie (2022) Integrated Implementation of Scotland's New Human Rights Framework : Workshop Series Findings. University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.

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Abstract

In March 2021, the Scottish Government committed to an ambitious legal framework that will give rise to a new range of duties and a new focus on groups whose rights are the least realised. We know that when the framework comes into effect, its success will depend upon the capacity of public authorities to translate its ambition into lived realities. Human rights and related equality protections have a constitutional quality. They are constitutional in the sense that they aim to regulate and guide the way that state actors (from central to local government and organisations tasked with the delivery of public services) treat people and prioritise their rights in relevant law, policy, and operational decision-making. Being constitutional in this sense means that legal human rights and related equality protections should provide a baseline – a foundation – for the strategic and operational delivery of public services. If these legal protections were introduced to a clean legislative and policy slate, they would act as a foundation stone, and domestic legislation and policy across the spectrum of services would be systematically built upwards from this foundation. This is not, of course, the context in which any law, including human rights and related equality law, is introduced. The new legal framework will be introduced into developed, and in some areas crowded, legal and policy landscapes. This is not negative – there are undoubtedly already many areas of good practice, including approaches which go beyond what human rights and related equality law demands, and the process of integrating human rights and related equality law provides standards against which such good practice can be identified and acknowledged. Further, it is positive that the process of integrating human rights and related equality law will at the same time provide standards against which gaps can be identified, where Scotland has not yet reached the baseline set in international human rights law. The core aim in Scotland is to meet, and actively plan to meet, this baseline as a way of securing better human rights and equality outcomes in people’s daily lives.

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