Civil liberties in the United Kingdom

Civil liberties in the United Kingdom are part of UK constitutional law and have a long and formative history. This is usually considered to have begun with Magna Carta of 1215, a landmark document in British constitutional history.[1] Development of civil liberties advanced in common law and statute law in the 17th and 18th centuries, notably with the Bill of Rights 1689.[2] During the 19th century, working-class people struggled to win the right to vote and join trade unions. Parliament responded with new legislation beginning with the Reform Act 1832. Attitudes towards suffrage and liberties progressed further in the aftermath of the first and second world wars. Since then, the United Kingdom's relationship to civil liberties has been mediated through its membership of the European Convention on Human Rights. The United Kingdom, through Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, led the drafting of the Convention, which expresses a traditional civil libertarian theory.[3] It became directly applicable in UK law with the enactment of the Human Rights Act 1998.

A number of legislative changes affecting civil liberties have been debated and enacted since the late 20th century. The Identity Cards Act 2006 was repealed, largely on civil liberty grounds,[4][5] and the UK does not have a central civilian registry and there are no identification requirements in public. Several legislative changes affecting civil liberties were justified by appeals to public safety and National Security, hastened on by crises such as the September 11 attacks, the 7/7 bombings and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.[6][7][8] The COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom led to the introduction of the Coronavirus Act 2020, which was described by former Justice of the Supreme Court Lord Sumption as "the greatest invasion of personal liberty in [the UK's] history."[9] Nonetheless, vaccines offered through the national immunisation programme in the UK are not mandatory; and vaccinations are also not currently mandatory in the UK during a pandemic.[10][11] United Kingdom citizens have a negative right to freedom of expression under the common law.[12] Furthermore, a guarantee of freedom of expression is contained in statute in Article 10 of the Human Rights Act. However, there are exceptions including threatening, abusive or insulting words or behavior intending or likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress or cause a breach of the peace (which has been used to prohibit racist speech targeted at individuals).[13][14][15]

The relationship between human rights and civil liberties is often seen as two sides of the same coin. A right is something you may demand of someone, while a liberty is freedom from interference by another in your presumed rights. However, human rights are broader. In the numerous documents around the world, they involve more substantive moral assertions on what is necessary, for instance, for "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", "to develop one's personality to the fullest potential" or "protect inviolable dignity". "Civil liberties" are certainly that, but they are distinctly civil, and relate to participation in public life. As Professor Conor Gearty writes,

Civil liberties is another name for the political freedoms that we must have available to us all if it to be true to say of us that we live in a society that adheres to the principle of representative, or democratic, government.[16]

In other words, civil liberties are the "rights" or "freedoms" which underpin democracy. This usually means the right to vote, the right to life, the prohibition on torture, security of the person, the right to personal liberty and due process of law, freedom of expression and freedom of association.[17]

  1. ^ Brysk, edited by Alison; Shafir, Gershon (2007). National Insecurity and Human Rights: Democracies Debate Counterterrorism. University of California Press. p. 76. ISBN 9780520098602. {{cite book}}: |first1= has generic name (help)
  2. ^ "Britain's unwritten constitution". British Library. Archived from the original on 8 December 2015. Retrieved 27 November 2015. The key landmark is the Bill of Rights (1689), which established the supremacy of Parliament over the Crown.... The Bill of Rights (1689) then settled the primacy of Parliament over the monarch's prerogatives, providing for the regular meeting of Parliament, free elections to the Commons, free speech in parliamentary debates, and some basic human rights, most famously freedom from 'cruel or unusual punishment'.
  3. ^ see e.g. the Praemble to the Convention, which states the Convention is there to secure "effective political democracy".
  4. ^ "Labour rejects Tony Blair's call for ID cards". www.bbc.com. 2024-07-07. Retrieved 2025-09-03.
  5. ^ Tettenborn, Andrew (2025-09-03). "British politicians cannot be trusted with ID cards". The Telegraph. ISSN 0307-1235. Retrieved 2025-09-03.
  6. ^ "Terrorism Act 2006". Retrieved 2020-02-07.
  7. ^ "Civil Contingencies Act 2004". Retrieved 2020-02-07.
  8. ^ Nia, Gissou (April 2020). "Like after 9/11, governments could use coronavirus to permanently roll back our civil liberties". Independent. Retrieved 2020-02-07.
  9. ^ Pearson, Allison; Halligan, Liam (10 September 2020). "Planet Normal: Use of fear has brought about 'the greatest invasion of personal liberty in our history' –Lord Sumption". Telegraph Media Group Limited.
  10. ^ UCL (2022-01-10). "What vaccines are mandatory in the UK?". UCL News. Retrieved 2025-09-03.
  11. ^ Vagnoni, Cristiana; Rough, Elizabeth; Bunn, Sarah (8 March 2022). "UK Vaccination Policy". House of Commons Library.
  12. ^ Klug, Francesca (1996). Starmer, Keir; Weir, Stuart (eds.). The Three Pillars of Liberty: Political Rights and Freedoms in the United Kingdom. The Democratic Audit of the United Kingdom. Routledge. p. 165. ISBN 978-041509642-3.
  13. ^ Hensley, Thomas R. (2001). The Boundaries of Freedom of Expression & Order in American Democracy. Kent State University Press. p. 153. ISBN 9780873386920.
  14. ^ Klug 1996, pp. 175–179
  15. ^ Public Order Act 1986
  16. ^ Conor Gearty, Civil Liberties (2007) Clarendon Law Series, Oxford University Press, p.1
  17. ^ Care should be taken with such definitions. Much more "underpins" democracy than civil and political rights. Capacity for public participation goes into the social and economic: see, e.g. Jeremy Waldron, 'Social Citizenship and the Defence of Welfare Provision' (1993) in Liberal Rights: Collected papers 1981-91, Cambridge University Press, Ch.12; Also, the language of rights, liberties, freedoms, etc, etc, is inherently vague and the divisions between different rights in various documents are inevitably meaningless (e.g. is the right to liberty different from a fair trial, and does it matter?), and simply express country's cultural and historical preferences. At the core all these things come down to the mediation of relations between people, whether for power or resources or between individuals or the state. See, e.g. Alan Gewirth, Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Applications (1982); he puts forth the formula that any right can be put in the form of X claiming right Y against Z
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