Catherine Bearder MEP: Human Rights Act helps hold officials to account

Human rights are fundamental to everyone in Oxfordshire.

It’s about challenging the power of government, councils and any democratic institutions over the individual, whether they be Oxfordshire County Council, district councils or parish councils.

Under the Human Rights Act (HRA), governments came together to say they would defend people against any government that goes beyond its powers. It helps protect people against any authority that goes beyond its reach.

Getting rid of the HRA is a back step for getting a fair deal and for protecting people against intimidation and discrimination.

It’s very relevant to Oxfordshire, particularly because we have people at both universities studying human rights-related degrees and we have the Campsfield detention centre, which has been in the news a lot lately for alleged human rights abuses.

The HRA gives people the right to take action against the police. For example, there was a young girl recently in the news who got a wrongful conviction from police and was able to sue the police force by going through the Court of Human Rights.

It protects press freedom and helps get answers for grieving families who have lost a loved one, and it helps protect people in care.

For example, in Operation Bullfinch, the girls involved were in care, and I’m sure there will be cases coming to the Court of Human Rights from people who felt they weren’t protected sufficiently.

If you feel it’s important to have free speech and hold peaceful demonstrations in the street, and have a free press, you will realise people have fought for years and years to get these freedoms to give people some recourse against the state.

The Conservative government wanted to get rid of the HRA in the last parliament and we stopped it, but now they have a majority they can do almost what they want.

So now my party, the Liberal Democrats, are campaigning as we have always done to protect these human rights.

We have councillors across Oxfordshire who will be doing the best they can to promote these policies in their local communities, The values are the same at local and national level.

We took quite a pounding at the last election but that doesn’t mean to say our policies and values were wrong.

It was a difficult election fight. The fact that people didn’t want the SNP worked against us and we can’t rely on the same amount of money that the Tories can. Everything for us has to be done by volunteers and by fundraising.

But we’ve had 15,000 people join the party since the closure of the polls because people do recognise there is a real need for real values.

We still have quite a few councillors in Oxfordshire and they will be working at county level to keep the message going out and we will continue to recruit new members.

In politics once you get over losing the election you get up and keep going.

We need to be supporting local people and keeping the party moving forward.

We need to be fundraising in the local communities and making sure the local parties are viable, and we need to get back to selling our values to the people of Oxfordshire.