ORG responds to Conservative’s UK Bill of Rights proposal

Open Rights Group has responded to proposals for a UK Bill of Rights, published today by lawyer and journalist David Allen Green on his blog here:
http://jackofkent.com/2014/10/exclusive-tory-proposals-for-bill-of-rights/

Executive Director of Open Rights Group,  Jim Killock said:

“This will make it very convenient for the government to carry on with mass surveillance and ignore future legal decisions limiting GCHQ’s whole population profiling. It is clear is that this government is determined to reduce the human rights protections available to ordinary people in order to avoid facing limitations on its own powers. But it is precisely these limitations that allow democracies to hold governments to account.”

The proposals could impact upon the Privacy not Prism legal challenge that ORG and other applicants have launched with the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) by making it discretionary for the government to abide by any decision that the court makes.

For more information, please email press@openrightsgroup.org, 020 7096 1079