As 2011 draws to its close, Britain is witnessing a downward trend on its already dismal human rights records with a handful of major questions on the issue hanging in the air.
The year started with the UK government at loggerheads with the European Court of Human Rights over giving prisoners the right to vote in elections. The Court has ruled that Britain should extend voting to inmates as a legal right.
Meanwhile, Britain's counterterrorism policy and its related legislation continued to undermine the fundamentals of human rights in 2011.
Human Rights Watch raised concerns that key elements of the UK counterterrorism regulations and policies are incompatible with its obligations under the international human rights law.
Among several cases of human rights violations, the unexpected arrest of a Palestinian leader was the most controversial move.
British authorities arrested Sheikh Raed Salah, a Palestinian spiritual leader upon arrival in Britain on June 28 in his hotel room a night before he was to appear in a formal meeting in the parliament .
Months later British High Court ruled that the Palestinian leader was detained unlawfully.
Later, in October, the government launched a motion to review the universal jurisdiction act to preserve Israeli war criminals' immunity from being held accountable.
Universal jurisdiction derives its authority from Common Article 1 of the Geneva Conventions. It obliges all member states “to respect and ensure respect” for the laws of war, effectively requiring all states to prosecute suspected war criminals regardless of where the crimes were committed.
As the students and unions anti-austerity protests continued in 2011, British police's tactics in dealing with protesters were condemned as “outrageous” with prominent human rights lawyers claiming that the right to protest in Britain were seriously undermined so much so that people who planned a peaceful protest would seriously risk being caught and imprisoned even without a clear charge.
As the protests and social clampdown continued in 2011, fatal shooting of Mark Duggan, a black man from Tottenham on August 5 by the London Metropolitan Police (Met) sparked the worst civil disobedience in a generation, plunging the country into an all-out crisis.
Duggan's death lit a fuse in the long-standing atmosphere of mistrust between the lower income citizens and the branches of power and the Metropolitan police, in particular, for its racial profiling, bias and insolence.
According to official figures, at least 3,000 people were arrested in the aftermath of the unrests with courts remaining open through nights to deal with alleged offenders. The British government launched an all-out campaign to shut down social network communications and curb and control people's communications networks.
The Conservative-led British coalition made the boldest step in the country's history in the end of September with Home Secretary Theresa May blatantly calling for the scrapping of the Human Rights Acts 1998.
Many Conservative members of the parliament (MPs) as well as Tory ministers across the cabinet welcomed the Home Secretary's call, but it was received with dismay by almost all human rights campaigners and activists.
The Human Rights Act, voted into law in 1998, incorporates the articles of the European Convention on Human Rights into the British law.
The Act 'gives further effect' to rights and freedoms guaranteed under the European Convention.
But, the coalition government that is comprised of powerful eurosceptics is doing its best to abandon the act and make it even harder for British citizens to sue the British establishment for violation of human rights.
In early December, a secret recording showed one of Britain's largest lobbying companies boasting about its access to the heart of the government and how it uses the dark arts to bury negative coverage and influence public opinion.
A case in point was the lobbying company's suggestion that it could manipulate Google results to “drown” out negative coverage of human rights violations and child labor.
All these were happening in parallel with the continued pattern of Islamophobia in Britain.
The situation of Muslims was again one of the most pressing issues facing British society. A huge rise in the number of attacks on Muslims in Britain, increasing threats to civil liberties in the name of security measures, a resurgence in the activities of the far-right groups in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, and a crackdown on refugees fleeing persecution, all placed serious questions over Britain's commitment to protect minority rights.
MOL/AMR/HE
