Human rights and the "Hillsborough Law"

The Human Rights Act protects everyone’s rights and freedoms under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), including the right to life. It is because of the ECHR and the Human Rights Act that the state must not only safeguard life, but also properly investigate deaths at the hands of the state, or where the state appears to bear responsibility, to ensure full accountability when lives are lost.

After a long legal struggle to uncover the truth, the Hillsborough families were able to obtain verdicts of unlawful killing of their loved ones by relying on the ECHR through the Human Rights Act. Their campaign paved the way for the Public Office (Accountability) Bill, known as the “Hillsborough Law”, which creates a legal duty on public authorities to tell the truth and a fairer, more equal system to protect the rights of bereaved people and survivors.

This explainer tells the story of how the right to life, protected under the ECHR and the Human Rights Act, transformed the law and practice of effective public investigations in the UK for the Hillsborough families and countless others, thereby ensuring that people can hold the state accountable when its failings have fatal consequences.

This work is openly licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence CC BY 4.0.