Protecting Human Rights in the UK

Sunrise, not Sunset tells the story of an elderly Jewish couple who are heartbroken when the council allocates them to separate care homes. Then their daughter hits upon the Human Rights Act as the means to bring them back together.

The modern human rights framework emerged directly in response to the Holocaust, beginning with the Nuremberg Trials (1945–46), which shifted the world from laws that dehumanised to legal principles that upheld human dignity. These tribunals introduced the concepts of crimes against humanity, genocide and aggression as safeguards against the atrocities witnessed, placing individual and group rights at the centre of international law. Jewish legal thinkers played defining roles: Hersch Lauterpacht shaped “crimes against humanity,” and Raphael Lemkin coined “genocide”. Our namesake, Monsieur René Cassin, motivated by the Holocaust, helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights alongside Eleanor Roosevelt, ensuring it proclaimed the “inherent dignity and equal rights of all members of the human family”.  

The Universal Declaration, conceived as a direct response to the dehumanisation of the Holocaust, became the cornerstone of international human rights law, influencing treaties and protections that continue to shape our world today. 

Part of that legacy, and one of the most enduring safeguards born from the postwar human rights project, is the European Convention on Human Rights, which in 1998 was brought into UK law through the Human Rights Act.  

Campaign priorities include: 

• To promote the keeping and using of the Human Rights Act. 

• To protect the UK’s commitment to the European Convention on Human Rights. 

• To empower Jewish communal organisations to embed the Human Rights Act in their practice