There has continued to be little evidence of the public sector explicitly promoting human rights or delivering specific human rights obligations.
Establishing evidence of compliance with human rights obligations in Scotland should not be so difficult especially if public authorities had followed the recommendations from 2006 such as ‘adopting a Human Rights Policy’ to ensure accountability. Human rights are still not fully understood and mainstreamed across the public sector in Scotland and this survey received some correspondence from staff who are struggling to respond to the information request.
Another problem is the confusion between equality and human rights law. Human rights and equality are different laws and require different, but interdependent, strategies. The confusion arises from a lack of knowledge about the detail of the ECHR which does not provide a right to equality but rather the right to equal enjoyment of ECHR rights. So, for example, ensuring the right to respect for private and family life is enjoyed equally. To emphasise the distinction, the GB EHRC is responsible to the UK Government Equalities Office (GE0) in respect of its equality functions and to the UK Ministry of Justice in respect of its human rights duties.
What has been identified is an absence of action plans to implement human rights in Scotland which makes the process of monitoring, evaluation and accountability very difficult. At this stage there are only a few robust examples of public bodies explicitly mainstreaming knowledge and application of human rights law across policies, services and the decision-making process. Despite the depressing picture, we did gain new information, have captured signs of good practice and progressive developments and again confirmed the need for the public sector to access assistance and expertise to enable them to comply with Section 6 of the HRA. For example help from the EHRC and SHRC to deliver their human rights obligations e.g. toolkits and basic information on which human rights are relevant to whom.