Gender Auditing the Human Rights Act 1998

Abstract

With the passage of the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA), a new era has begun as a distinct rights culture has come to pervade UK law, society and political life. The purpose of this article is to test the progressive credentials of the HRA in the light of the long-standing and stringent critique of rights discourse by feminists through an assessment of the legislation's capacity to improve the protection of the fundamental rights of women and sexual minorities. Using data emerging from applications of the HRA before the courts, the paper carries out a gender audit of the Act to weigh the balance of its positive and negative implications for women and minority litigants and highlights areas of activity in which claims might be further advanced in terms of human rights. Employing feminist legal scholarship to frame its analysis, the paper investigates the examples of sexual violence, reproductive rights and the rights of transgender persons and sexual minorities, in order to explore the reconfiguration of conflict of rights situations under the HRA and the balancing of competing right claims as they are beginning to emerge in the new rights culture.