The United Kingdom and Human Rights - College of Social ...

28 The United Kingdom and Human Rights Thinking
encouragement of respect for human rights. Development
since then has been continuous, beginning with
the UN Universal Declaration of 1948—although by this
time Mr. Attlee's Government was less than enthusiastic
about setting out human rights in such a document.
Since then, the impetus for further international human
rights Declarations and Conventions has become unstoppable.
They include the two International Covenants of
1966, the Convention on Elimination of Discrimination
against Women, the Convention on Torture and the
recent Convention on the Rights of the Child. Such
Conventions are in the process of creating a growing
body of international human rights law, binding states
who have ratified and in some cases also indicating the
scope of international customary law.
Contemporaneously with UN developments, regional
implementation machinery was being developed in
Europe with active participation by the Attlee Government.
The Council of Europe's Statute decreed that
respect for human rights was a condition of membership.
The European Convention on Human Rights of
1953, which followed a lengthy drafting process, was a
joint Western European achievement. The Convention's
vitality in operation owes most to the smaller countries
of northern Europe and to Germany and Austria.
Although the quasi-judicial Commission created by the
Convention was capable of hearing individual petitions
from 1955, the United Kingdom and France only
recognised the Commission's competence to hear petitions
from individuals in 1966 and 1974 respectively.
Once that individual right of petition was accorded, the
United Kingdom made a major unintended contribution
to the growing European jurisprudence of human rights:
of 108 cases in which the European Court of Human
Rights had by 1989 found violations, 23 came from the
United Kingdom. The United Kingdom was, until 1987,