Twelve months ago, the legal profession was gearing up for what many believed would be the biggest upheaval to the legal system since the Woolf reforms. The Human Rights Act, which came into force on 2 October, 2000, was expected to paralyse the system with a welter of unmeritorious claims, clogging the courts and triggering the wholesale collapse of litigation.
In the months since then, this school of thought has been proved resoundingly incorrect. Although figures supplied by the Lord Chancellor’s department show a slight rise in the number of High Court cases raising human rights points from the first to second quarter after implementation, it is clear there is no flood of new litigation. In the first quarter of the act’s implementation, 79 cases involving human rights challenges were brought, rising in the second quarter to 102 cases. As one senior litigator puts it: “It is business as usual.”
