Weekly Human Rights News: 23/08/2024

This week’s human rights news includes our bespoke human rights training offers for regulators and Ombudsman services and a modern slavery case being brought against the Home Office. 

This month we have been planning a range of human rights support solutions alongside our four partner organisations: African Women's Empowerment Forum, Bomoko NI, Cwm Taf People First and the Parent and Carer Alliance. The co-design process involves listening to what community groups tell us will enable them and the people they support to use human rights advocacy and approaches in their lives and work. As the groups are all so different, the solutions will be too! We are putting the final touches on the plans for what we will be creating, how it will be designed, and how we can ensure it reaches the hands of people who need it the most. We will share what we will be making with the groups soon! 

Regulators and Ombudsman services can play a crucial role in ensuring that public authorities are meeting their legal duties enshrined within the Human Rights Act. They can also be considered a public service themselves, with their own Human Rights Act duties to understand and follow in their work. We’re offering bespoke workshops and programmes for these services to support them to embed a human rights approach across their work. 

A participant in our recent programme with the Housing Ombudsman Service described it as, “a really solid grounding in the Human Rights Act and so useful because it also provided specific knowledge on how it applies in our sector.”

This week, we're sadly saying goodbye to Human Rights Officer Phoebe, who will be leaving BIHR to join the National Deaf Children's Society. Phoebe joined BIHR in 2022, bringing with her expertise in special educational needs and disability services, which led to the creation of our bespoke SENDIASS human rights training and our SENDIASS blog series. She will be missed and everyone at BIHR wishes her the best of luck for the future.

Survivors of modern slavery are bringing a Human Rights Act case against the Home Office 

In 2020, a group of Ghanian fishermen were rescued from “abject conditions” on a UK-based ship owned by TN Trawlers. They have since been recognised by the UK Government as survivors of modern slavery.  

The men were originally given permission to enter the UK to work as seamen but not to leave the ship and stay on UK shores. On the ship, the men were subjected to modern slavery, forced to work long hours without time off and made to live in “grossly unsanitary and cramped” conditions. The men are arguing that the Home Office breached their Article 4 right to be free from slavery and forced labour by not having systems in place to protect the rights of contract seamen like them and by not identifying that they were at real and immediate risk of having their rights breached. 

Source: Leigh Day