Fundamental Rights and Brexit

Seminar Series: ISEL

Withdrawal from the EU (‘Brexit’) will mark an important step towards a dis-entrenchment of human rights in the UK’s constitutional order opening the door to far-reaching and potentially regressive human rights reform. It is argued that Brexit is likely to result in an overall weakening of fundamental rights protection in the UK in substantive terms with the loss of rights protected by the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (Charter or CFR) and their unrealised potential; as well as in procedural terms with a loss of remedies against human rights infringements originating both in domestic and in EU law. This reduction in the level of protection is not compensated for by a possibly continuing indirect influence of EU fundamental rights standards on domestic protections – through continued adherence to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and from future cooperation between the EU and the UK, in particular in the field of data protection.

Speaker: Dr Tobias Lock, University of Edinburgh