Civil liberties in the United Kingdom

The United Kingdom, through Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, led the drafting of the Convention, which expresses a traditional civil libertarian theory.

Their removal has been generally justified by appeals to public safety and National Security and hastened on by crises such as the September 11 attacks, the 7/7 bombings and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.

[4][5][6] The pandemic oversaw 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.

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".

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.

The Bill of Rights 1689 secured the supremacy of Parliament over the King, laying the foundations of representative democracy.
Sir William Blackstone was the archetypal figure of the British Enlightenment, a legal scholar who in his Commentaries professed the liberty of citizens deriving from the Magna Carta and the common law .
After selling her home, English activist Emmeline Pankhurst travelled constantly, giving speeches throughout Britain and the United States. One of her most famous speeches, Freedom or death , was delivered in Connecticut in 1913.
As well as being instrumental in drafting it, the United Kingdom signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights under Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin in 1950.
Margaret Thatcher oversaw a gradual tightening of security legislation to crack down on industrial protests and the Provisional IRA.
The Brighton Hotel Bombing by the Provisional Irish Republican Army to coincide with the Conservative Party conference preceded a sterner approach to security legislation.
Tony Blair and then-U.S. President George W. Bush both introduced rafts of new security legislation as a reaction to terrorism after the September 11, 2001 attacks and the Iraq War .