LSE Events | Professor Conor Gearty | Human Rights after Brexit: still on fantasy island?

Speaker(s): Professor Conor Gearty
Respondent(s): Professor Sionaidh Douglas Scott, Professor Steve Peers
Chair: Dr Emmanuel Melissaris

Recorded on 8 December 2016 at Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building

As Home Secretary, Theresa May was more hostile to human rights than was any other cabinet minister in David Cameron's government. Now as Prime Minister she must not only make a definitive decision about where human rights fit in her vision of Britain but also whether they can have any place at all in light of the need to reconstruct Brexit Britain. Is this another piece of European clutter than needs now to be thrown out? Does the Human Rights Act get in the way of negotiating Brexit with the EU? Might it even prevent radical change on for eg immigration after Brexit is achieved? Or as many Tories have long argued, is the answer a new bill of rights for Britain? Or perhaps the answer is no change at all - might a defiantly unrepealable Human Rights Act be our lifeline to a civilised Continent, preserved until the country comes to its senses and returns to the European family?

Conor Gearty launches his new book On Fantasy Island: Britain, Europe and Human Rights.

Sionaidh Douglas-Scott is Professor of European and Human Rights Law at the University of Oxford.

Sir Stephen Sedley was a judge of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales from 1999 to 2011 and is currently is a visiting professor at Oxford.

[Vesivian]

Crowd seems like an annoying bunch, giggling at every line that's not even funny. Great talk though

[terencefield]

Could things be more utterly depressing. This plus the horror of unavoidable severe accelerating climate change. A poisonous future for our future generations.