LONDON (Reuters) -Britain’s new government will shelve plans for a Bill of Rights aimed at giving London power to ignore rulings from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), the Sun newspaper reported on Wednesday.
The ECHR earlier this year issued last minute injunctions to prevent a handful of asylum seekers being deported to Rwanda until a legal challenge in the UK was settled – effectively blocking the government’s much criticised plans to send migrants to Rwanda.
New British Prime Minister Liz Truss’s new cabinet has agreed on plans to shelve the bill, the Sun’s political editor said on Twitter.
“The bill is a mess and its not going to come back in anything like its current form,” the Sun quoted an anonymous source as saying.
The Bill of Rights, conceived under former justice secretary and deputy prime minister Dominic Raab, was intended to make clear that Britain’s Supreme Court had legal supremacy and ECHR decisions did not always need to be followed by British courts.
Raab, who was replaced as head of the justice department by Brandon Lewis on Tuesday, had said the bill would reinforce parliament’s role as the ultimate decision maker and strengthen rights such as freedom of speech.
(Reporting by Sachin Ravikumar. Editing by Andrew MacAskill and William James)
