Sub-s (4): words "Secretary of State" in square brackets substituted by SI 2003/1887, art 9, Sch 2, para 10(1).

Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe was the Chair of the Committee on Legal and Administrative Questions of the council's Consultative Assembly from 1949 to 1952, and oversaw the drafting of the European Convention on Human Rights.

As a founding member of the Council of Europe, the United Kingdom acceded to the European Convention on Human Rights in March 1951.

When the election resulted in a landslide Labour victory, the party, under the leadership of Tony Blair, fulfilled the pledge by the Parliament passing the Human Rights Act the following year.

[6] They do not interpret a statute so as to give it a meaning that would conflict with legislative intent, and courts have been reluctant in particular to "read out" provisions for this reason.

[17] Although the Act, by its own terms, applies only to public bodies, it has had increasing influence on private law litigation between individual citizens leading some academics (source?)

The way that public duty is exercised in private law was dealt with in a June 2016 decision McDonald v McDonald & Ors [2016] UKSC 28 (15 June 2016) where the UK Supreme Court firstly considered the question "... whether a court, when entertaining a claim for possession by a private sector owner against a residential occupier, should be required to consider the proportionality of evicting the occupier, in the light of section 6 of the Human Rights Act 1998 and article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights" The Supreme Court decided (paragraph 46) that "there are many cases where the court can be required to balance conflicting Convention rights of two parties, eg where a person is seeking to rely on her article 8 rights to restrain a newspaper from publishing an article which breaches her privacy, and where the newspaper relies on article 10.

A remedy under the Act is therefore not limited to a Declaration of incompatibility possibly taking into account the equitable maxim Equity delights to do justice and not by halves.

"[27] Where it is impossible to read primary legislation in a Convention compliant manner, the only sanction available to the courts is to make a declaration of incompatibility in respect of it.

[29] Such a declaration has no direct impact upon the continuing force of the legislation but it is likely to produce public pressure upon the government to remove the incompatibility.

[30] During the campaign for the 2005 parliamentary elections the Conservatives under Michael Howard declared their intention to "overhaul or scrap" the Human Rights Act:

The time had come to liberate the nation from the avalanche of political correctness, costly litigation, feeble justice, and culture of compensation running riot in Britain today and warning that the politically correct regime ushered in by Labour's enthusiastic adoption of human rights legislation has turned the age-old principle of fairness on its head.

[37]The schoolboy arsonist allowed back into the classroom because enforcing discipline apparently denied his right to education; the convicted rapist given £4000 compensation because his second appeal was delayed; the burglar given taxpayers' money to sue the man whose house he broke into; travellers who thumb their nose at the law allowed to stay on green belt sites they have occupied in defiance of planning laws.

[clarification needed][40] Constitutional critics since the Human Rights Bill was tabled at parliament claimed it would result in the unelected judiciary making substantive judgments about government policies and "mass-legislating" in their amendments to the common law resulting in a usurpation of Parliament's legislative supremacy and an expansion of the UK courts' justiciability.

A leading case of R (on the application of Daly) v Secretary of State for the Home Department highlights how the new proportionality test borrowed from ECtHR jurisprudence has allowed a greater scrutiny of the substantive merits of decisions of public bodies, meaning that actions against such bodies, judicial reviews, are more of an appeal than a traditional judicial review.

[42] Paul Craig argues that this results in the courts adopting linguistically strained interpretations instead of issuing declarations of incompatibility.

[45] Some politicians in the two largest parties, including some ministers, have criticised the Human Rights Act as to the willingness of the judiciary to make declarations on incompatibility against terrorism legislation.

Baron Reid argued that the Act was hampering the fight against global terrorism in regard to controversial control orders:

[51] Judge Dean Spielmann, the President of ECtHR, warned in 2013 that the United Kingdom could not withdraw from the Convention on Human Rights without jeopardising its membership of the European Union.

[52] It has also been claimed that, since the Good Friday Agreement (which ended the sectarian terrorist violence of the Troubles) is founded on the convention, it would be breached by any withdrawal.

[55] Following the 2015 election win for the Conservative Party, Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Justice, was charged with implementing the reforms which were previously blocked by the Liberal Democrats in the coalition government.

[57] As before 1998, claims relying on ECtHR jurisprudence which conflicted with the "British Bill of Rights" would have to go to a court in Strasbourg rather than being able to be heard in the UK.

[58] However, the Conservatives' manifesto from the next general election in 2017 pledged to retain the Human Rights Act "while the process of Brexit is underway".

[59][needs update] This has since changed once again, as the rise of Suella Braverman in the Conservative Party saw the HRA campaigned against in its entirety.