Amnesty announced that National Rail has pulled Amnesty’s adverts on the Human Rights Act for being “too political”.
The adverts formed part of an awareness campaign set to highlight the importance of the act and how it had helped the families of Hillsborough victims, the peace process in Northern Ireland, as well as other issues which impacted ordinary people.
Amnesty International is just one of more than a hundred organisations and charities that have urged the prime minister Theresa May not to repeal the Human Rights Act, and replace it with a British Bill of Rights.
The billboards were set to run in train stations in Liverpool, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham and London’s Waterloo and Victoria stations from today. However, Amnesty revealed they were pulled at short notice.
A spokesperson for Network Rail said they first saw the adverts yesterday. The spokesperson said, “On inspection, they don’t meet our rules on ‘political’ advertising. We aim to be fair and even-handed when deciding which adverts to accept in our stations and have a set of rules in place to ensure all advertising is treated equally.”
Despite National Rail’s decision to drop the ad campaign, Transport for London (TfL) carried the adverts in Westminster underground station as planned.
Amnesty’s UK Director, Kate Allen, said the charity was “very disappointed” with National Rail’s decision not to go ahead with the advertisement campaign. Allen said, We simply don’t accept that basic human rights are ever a political issue. The irony is that human rights cross party-political lines and so do failures, cover-ups and abuses. Successive governments managed to let down the Hillsborough families, and their story demonstrates precisely why we need enduring human rights protections which aren’t redrafted by the government of the day, on a political whim. It’s vital to safeguard basic rights in these politically volatile times as constant protections relied on by ordinary people.”
Earlier this year a spokesperson for the Ministry of Justice said that the “government has a mandate to reform and modernise the UK human rights framework”. They said the new Bill of Rights would “protect fundamental human rights, but prevent their abuse and restore some common sense to the system”. “We will fully consult on our proposals,” the spokesperson added.
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