United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Monaghan, Chris ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9331-804X (2025) United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. In: The 2024 I·CONnect Global Review of Constitutional Law. Constitutional Studies Program at the University of Texas at Austin, Texas, USA. (In Press)

Abstract

2024 was an eventful year for the United Kingdom. The General Election on 4 July 2024 saw the Labour party win a large majority in the House of Commons. The new Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer KC had been a successful and high-profile human rights lawyer before being appointed as the Director of Public Prosecutions (2008-2013). Sir Keir became a Member of Parliament in 2015 and then in 2020 replaced Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour party. It is significant that the new Prime Minister is both a lawyer, and one with a long-standing reputation in human rights law given the criticism of human rights by the previous Conservative government. Starmer has published a number of books such as European Human Rights Law: The Human Rights Act 1998 and the European Convention on Human Rights, Criminal Justice, Police Powers and Human Rights, The Three Pillars of Liberty: Political Rights and Freedoms in the United Kingdom. The key point is that the United Kingdom’s new Prime Minister is a person who understood the constitution and the importance of human rights. This was important after the shortcomings of the previous Conservative governments in their approach to the constitution and respect for accepted constitutional norms. For example, the previous Prime Minister Rishi Sunak MP had appointed a Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, who would criticize the Human Rights Act 1998 as the Criminal Rights Act, and Boris Johnson was held by the House of Commons Committee of Privileges in June 2023 to have lied to Parliament and Johnson had also suggested that he would not comply with the law.

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