For the first time, all the UK’s political parties on the right favor withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights. But the story of the Hillsborough Law shows how human-rights laws, not least the ECHR, help ordinary people hold the state accountable for its costliest failings.
OXFORD—The international order that emerged in the aftermath of World War II is confronting a legitimacy crisis, and the system for protecting human rights is no exception. Nationalist-populist narratives portraying human-rights treaties and the institutions that uphold them as examples of foreign interference in domestic politics, and thus undemocratic assaults on sovereignty, are taking hold even in countries that led the world in creating them.
