Human Rights as national identity and a step towards independence: The Scottish response to the UK Government’s attempt to erode the human rights framework.

The definition, scope and level of protection of human rights is often a contentious element in a federal, regional or devolved system, with different and conflicting rights interpretations being defended in different levels or parts of the state, particularly when democratic backsliding is taking place either at the federal level or in one of the sub-state units. These multilevel human rights tensions take on new and distinct dimensions in the context of a multinational federal or quasi-federal state, when the party in government in one of the sub-state units defends the national minority status of the sub-state people and aims to achieve its independence from the broader state. This is exemplified clearly by the case of Scotland during the time when Nicola Sturgeon was First Minister, and in the Scottish institutions’ response to the Conservative-led Whitehall Government’s attempt to erode human rights protections across the UK. In this sense, and by strongly contesting these rights-restricting proposals, the Scottish institutions of self-government: (i) used Scotland’s strong commitment to human rights to help further build their concept of civic nationalism and of distinctiveness in the context of the UK; (ii) used their own legal counter-proposals for the incorporation of international human rights treaties into the law of Scotland, starting with the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child, to expand and further develop their competences within the devolution framework; (iii) and in this way, provided some of the initial groundwork for the development of the legal and constitutional framework of a potential independent Scotland in the future, further building their case in this sense. This paper will reflect on the Scottish experience in this context and on the UK Government’s hardline response which, supported by a Supreme Court that had also received pressures to be less activist, has had far-reaching consequences, not only for the Scottish human rights framework, but for the Scottish devolution settlement more generally.