The UK director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), Yasmine Ahmed, stated that the UK's politicization of human rights is an assault on democracy, which must be stopped before it becomes too late.

During an interview with The Guardian, Ahmed, who has been the UK director of HRW since the end of 2020, argued that the government's implication of aiming to “disapply” the Human Rights Act to an emergency bill to send asylum seekers to Rwanda is an escalating attack on human rights, despite the fact that the supreme court ruled the Rwanda policy illegal. 

The bill aimed to deport migrants who enter illegally into the UK by boats across the English Channel to a third country like Rwanda. The matter was transferred to the Supreme Court after the UK Court of Appeal ruled that the bill was illegal.

“With previous governments there was always an attempt to at least try to appear as if they were complying with domestic or international human rights law and to respect the courts and human rights institutions,” Ahmed said, noting, “Now there is no attempt to do this – in fact, it’s quite the opposite.”

She continued to say that Prime Minister “Rishi Sunak’s government must know that even scrapping the Human Rights Act will not prevent it from facing significant legal barriers to its Rwanda policy, but what we’re seeing is the UK moving towards a place where the government feels it can undermine the integrity of the judiciary, undermine or scrap human rights laws that don’t serve its current political agenda, and create new laws that do.”

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“This is a dangerous place to find ourselves in. This can start to look very much like authoritarianism”, she added.

'Impossible to put back together'

Ahmed recalls the UK government attacking human rights principles and international law ever since she took up the UK directorship of Human Rights Watch three years ago.

“Not only is the government talking about ripping up domestic human rights law and ignoring its international obligations, it has launched an open attack on the right to peacefully demonstrate, is locking up climate protesters, criminalizing refugees and has given the police unprecedented powers over citizens,” Ahmed said.

“This approach not only discredits and undermines our ability to hold other human rights violators to account on the international stage, but it creates a model of governance that puts political ideology over a state’s legal obligation to uphold basic human rights that were put into law to protect us all. Once you attack, discredit and tear up these laws and frameworks it could be almost impossible to put them back together.”

According to Ahmed, the UK's attempts to ban pro-Palestinian protests by the former Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, and its attacks on the supreme court ruling, are examples that show how daring the state has become in showing disrespect toward human rights.

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“They have been successful in making us believe that ripping up human rights laws and putting new ones in place will only affect vulnerable and controversial groups,” she noted, adding: “But all of us, at any time, may need to exercise our rights or hold the state to account and suddenly discover that we have lost the power to do so.”