Human Rights Watch on January 11, 2024, in its annual World Report 2024 on the events of 2023, announced that the United Kingdom government’s policies and practices both severely eroded domestic human rights protections and undermined its efforts to promote human rights globally in 2023.
“The UK had another dismal year for human rights in 2023,” said Yasmine Ahmed, UK director at Human Rights Watch. “The government continued its assault on fundamental rights in the UK, including to protest and seek asylum, which alongside the application of double standards in its foreign policy, undermined its efforts to promote human rights globally.”
According to the World Report 2024, the UK government, in 2023, weakened basic freedoms, like people’s right to protest, with new legislation. The UK’s pursuit of its plan to transfer asylum seekers to Rwanda and the introduction of the Illegal Migration Act attacked the rights of refugees and asylum seekers and generally had a corrosive influence on international norms and standards.
The report also added: “In April, the UK government passed the Public Order Act, further criminalizing people’s right to peaceful protest; undermining freedom of expression, peaceful assembly, and association; and limiting workers’ strikes.
The law came amid an ongoing crackdown on people protesting the government’s increasingly regressive climate change policies. Moreover, in July, the UK government adopted the widely condemned Illegal Migration Act, which bans access to asylum and undermines modern slavery and trafficking protections for anyone who arrives “irregularly” to the UK. Despite an ongoing cost of living crisis, the UK government failed to adopt policies to ensure people’s rights to social security and an adequate standard of living, including food and adequate housing”.
The report also announced that the UK authorities also fail to adequately address racial inequalities and discrimination. In 2018 thousands of Black Britons belonging to the Windrush generation were deported, detained, and denied their rights because of repeated policy failings by the Home Office. Yet the government continues to fail these people, who still face serious difficulties accessing a complex.