Lord chancellor Dominic Raab’s Bill of Rights Bill will resume its parliamentary passage within weeks, according to media reports over the weekend. Raab told ITV news that the measure, shelved by Liz Truss when she became prime minister in September, would 'reinject a healthy dose of common sense to the system and end abuse of our laws'.

Raab introduced the measure under his first spell as lord chancellor in Boris Johnson’s administration. The bill is currently awaiting a second reading in the House of Commons. 

The measure would explicitly give UK courts supremacy over rulings of the European Court of Human Rights, such as the interim ruling by a Strasbourg judge last June which blocked flights carrying cross-channel migrants to Rwanda. 

The measure would also create a higher threshold for foreign national offenders seeking to challenge deportations based on the right to a private life and introduce a new permission stage for human rights challenges. 

Raab said over the weekend that the legislation will return to parliament ‘in the coming weeks’. It is likely to face a rocky parliamentary ride. One critic of the measure, Raab’s predecessor as lord chancellor Robert Buckland KC MP, last week described the measure as 'worse than useless'. Interviewed in The Spectator, Buckland said: 'It threatens spawning a whole range of domestic rights which I think really sit ill with the English common law tradition. We already have the likes of [Labour MP] Stella Creasy saying “I want a right to abortion, so I’m going to amend the bill”. All these things suddenly become a political headache.

'It’s a real problem for people like me, who want to just keep the “rights culture” under control.'

 

This article is now closed for comment.