Weekly Human Rights News: 08/11/24

As part of our 4-year London Communities Programme, Just Fair and BIHR are working with 4 community groups across the capital to develop, embed and test what human rights approaches look like and can achieve to support communities be treated with equal dignity and respect. One of BIHR’s partners is IRMO, the Indoamerican Refugee and Migrant Organisation, and this week we kicked off the start of an intensive November together looking at what the Human Rights Act is and how it works in real life as a tool for advocacy beyond the courtrooms. At the end of an energising session with around 20 of the staff from across the organisation the 4 most popular words to describe it were “Informative” “Interesting” “Practical” and “Exciting”. Next week we’re back in South London for a deeper dive working with specific IRMO teams... watch this space!

BIHR is working together with Partners in Care and Health on a programme of work to promote the human rights of autistic people and people with a learning disability. This includes a resource which BIHR has produced for practitioners as well as a series of workshops.

On Friday 6^th November we held an online event to promote our new resource which will be available on our website next week. The event was attended by over 250 people. As part of our event we discussed how human rights law works in the UK and explored how embedding human rights within decision making can reduce the level of restrictions that some young autistic people and some young people with learning disabilities experience on a daily basis. Our lived experience expert Kirsten Peebles also shared her perspective on why human rights matter and make such a difference. We discussed how and why we made the resource and offered a sneak peek of what is inside and how practitioners can make best use of it.

We are pleased to announce that we have two new additions to the posters available on our resources page.  We have a poster of the rights in the Human Rights Act (HRA) and we also have a poster all about the European Convention On Human Rights (ECHR).

The Independent Schools Council is launching a human rights case against the UK Government

 Last week, the UK Government shared its Autumn Budget (its plans for spending over the coming year) which included confirmation that private schools will no longer being exempt from paying VAT. This means private schools will have to pay 20% tax on the fees they charge.

 On Friday 1st November, the Independent Schools Council (ICS) announced that it is taking legal action against this decision, saying that it risks the right to education (Article 2, Protocol 1) protected by the Human Rights Act. They also say it risks the right to be free from discrimination (Article 14) because it disproportionately affects pupils with special educational needs, pupils at faith schools and girls at single-sex schools. 

 Read ICS’ statement