A UK bill of rights is unlikely to come soon, but there is still hope for the future.

It is a pity – if only for the future of the idea of a British bill of rights – that Labour’s electoral hopes look so dire. In such a context, the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights, chaired by Andrew Dismore MP, has done rather well in its summer report, A Bill of Rights for the UK?

Gordon Brown advanced the idea of a bill of rights last year, as part of the Governance of Britain agenda that briefly illuminated the early days of his premiership. It was a genuine surprise. Rulers rarely abdicate power voluntarily: bills of rights, from Magna Carta onward, more often grow out of the barrel of a gun – often literally. Bills of rights were legacies of both the French and American revolutions and, more recently, part of the peace packages in South Africa and Northern Ireland. Germany’s judicial protection of its ‘basic law’ and constitutional rights – surprisingly quoted as an admirable model by none other than David Cameron – was the legacy of reconstruction after the Second World War. Even laid-back Canadians needed rows over the repatriation of their constitution to pass their Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The joint committee is well aware of such precedents. It also accepts that ‘there needs to be sufficient consensus across party lines to make the process of adopting a bill of rights a truly constitutional event rather than a party-political one’. This, by itself, places a somewhat high hurdle at a time of such political feverishness. Readers of the Daily Mail, hysterically opposed to human rights, are a key electoral demographic for both major political parties.

So, in the short term, the idea of a bill of rights is unlikely to make much progress. However, the long term result may well be different. Once in office, David Cameron is likely to dilute his opposition to the Human Rights Act. A desire to join Belarus as the only European countries outside the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) hardly fits with his urbane style. Thus the UK is likely to remain subject to the ECHR and, frankly, any pretence of anything different is nonsense on stilts. This is where the joint committee begins: any bill of rights must provide more than the ECHR. It must, as the committee says, be ‘ECHR-plus’.

The crucial question is: what rights are we talking about? The joint committee has done us the immense service of actually producing a draft. A preamble states underlying values as protection of the rule of law, liberty, democracy, fairness and civic duty. ECHR rights are specifically protected. The most contentious new additions will be those relating to economic and social rights, such as the right to medical care or housing. The joint committee followed the South African model of requiring only ‘progressive realisation’ rather than immediate compliance and allowing specific reference to available resources – a mechanism which has allowed its Constitutional Court successfully to nudge the South African government towards compliance in relation to AIDS treatment or housing without too much frightening of its finance ministry.

One of the interesting elements in the report is the wish to give Parliament more of a role in relation to human rights. The Human Rights Act requires ministers to certify that legislation is compatible with the act, but not to provide any detail. The committee wants a fully reasoned statement supporting the certificate. The committee also wants the government to report periodically to Parliament on the working of the act. The present position is that, outside the joint committee and certain members of the House of Lords, Parliament is distinctly short on members who are effective in holding the government to account on its human rights requirements. This is crucial because, by default, it then falls on the courts to do so. Cornered ministers find it all too tempting then to argue that such accountability is anti-democratic.

The committee is pretty savvy in its tackling of the question of whether this is to be a ‘British’ bill of rights. Gordon Brown’s original paper very much linked the idea to the need, as he feels it, to re-emphasise the values of Britain against internal and rival nationalisms. However, ‘British’ is immediate anathema to one of the communities in Northern Ireland (though not the other) and lines up the automatic opposition of most Scots (the Welsh will, no doubt, catch up in due course).

Much better, says the committee, to see this as a UK set of minimum rights to which internal jurisdictions may make their own additions. This is shrewd, because something has to be done to outflank the Scottish nationalists, in particular, who are looking for any fight they can get on jurisdiction and may well want to enshrine such inalienable Scottish rights as free tertiary education and hospital parking.

The Parliamentary Joint Committee has done its job well. This report takes the debate on. Andrew Dismore, its chair, is a former practising solicitor. He has done a good job in pulling his disparate team together – from both houses and all parties. Would it be too much to claim that the management skills this must have required, and the imaginative pragmatism of the result, reflects something of the skills honed by his one-time profession? Even if this is too fanciful, he and the committee have done a good job.

Roger Smith is director of the law reform and human rights organisation Justice.