| Summary/Abstract |
This issue of Political Quarterly commemorates the seventieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is a timely subject, not only because of the anniversary, but also because the status of human rights has become a contested issue in British politics. Only a few years ago, the protection of human rights seemed to be a relatively uncontentious political objective, a consensual expression of the liberal values that were presumed to be the lodestars of any decent political order. More recently, a steady drum beat of scepticism about human rights has become a progressively louder presence in British public life. This scepticism has now been given a more analytical presentation by Lord Sumption, the former Supreme Court Justice and historian, who devoted his 2019 Reith Lectures on BBC Radio 4 to making the case that the law—particularly human rights law—has begun to usurp the place of democratic politics, to the disadvantage of Britain’s constitutional equilibrium. According to Sumption, decisions that were once the province of Parliament, or which existed outside of legal regulation altogether, have increasingly been subsumed into ‘law’s expanding empire’. This is a realm controlled by judges, whose imperium possesses none of the democratic accountability that constrains elected politicians.1
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