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Human Rights

Trial by media does not create rights that people can go to court to enforce, and that is exactly what happened in the cases to which I referred. The media had not achieved that objective. An example is the case of the older people living in local authority residential care homes who secured much better protection against home closures, which involve risks to people’s life, health, dignity and psychological well-being. Disabled people who had difficulty accessing care services because of restrictive manual handling policies have benefited from a judicial reinterpretation of the manual handling regulations to make them human rights compatible. Council tenants established a duty for local authority landlords to maintain their homes in decent condition, so that councils did not let properties that were unfit for human habitation. A disabled council tenant successfully used the Act to establish that a local authority had a positive obligation to enable her to lead as normal a life as possible by providing the specially adapted accommodation that she was assessed as needing, but which it had denied her.