If re-elected, UK gov't would scrap Human Rights Act

The UK's prime minister says his party will get rid of the Human Rights Act, but wont leave the European Convention on Human Rights entirely.

The UK's conservatives will abolish the Human Rights Act if they are reelected in 2015, Prime Minister David Cameron announced on Wednesday.

“When that charter was written, in the aftermath of the Second World War, it set out the basic rights we should respect. But since then, interpretations of that charter have led to a whole lot of things that are frankly wrong,” Cameron stated, according to RT.

Cameron warned the act is getting in the way of deporting non-UK citizens suspected of terrorism.

“The suggestion that you’ve got to apply the human rights convention even on the battlefields of Helmand. And now – they want to give prisoners the vote. I’m sorry, I just don’t agree,” he stated.

The comments came on the final day of his Conservative Party's four day convention.

The act brought into force the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). According to The Independent, Cameron has been pressured in the past by members of his own party, who have called for the UK to drop the ECHR.

However, rather than leave the ECHR entirely, Cameron suggested a future Tory government would replace the Act with a UK “bill of rights.”

Human rights groups have slammed the move, with Amnesty's UK government affairs head Allan Hogarth stating, “Cameron appears intent on rubbishing the UK's commitment to human rights and so undermining its influence as a moral authority on the world stage.”

“Lest we forget we are talking about a European court which oversees governments and has previously reprimanded the UK government when it wanted to indefinitely retain the DNA of innocent people, when it placed restrictions on the freedom of the press and when it decided that it was happy to indefinitely detain terror suspects without charge or trial,” Hogarth warned.

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