- Target:
- Secretary of State for Justice
- Region:
- United Kingdom
- Website:
- banbenefitsbashing.blogspot.co.uk
The Human Rights Act 1998 enshrined the European Convention of Human Rights into UK law which included Article 14, Prohibition of discrimination:
“The enjoyment of the rights and freedoms set forth in this Convention shall be secured without discrimination on any ground such as sex, race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, association with a national minority, property, birth or other status.”
The ECHR list of grounds of discrimination is not exclusive to the attributes stated and it is clearly stating these as examples only.
The Equality Act 2000 goes further by singling out public authorities’ need to reduce inequality cased by socio-economic disadvantage:
“An authority to which this section applies must, when making decisions of a strategic nature about how to exercise its functions, have due regard to the desirability of exercising them in a way that is designed to reduce the inequalities of outcome which result from socio-economic disadvantage”.
However the Equality Act fails to identify socio-economic disadvantage as a protected characteristic that should not be discriminated against in sections 13 to 19.
We are therefore calling on the Secretary of State for Justice to amend the Equality Act 2000 to include socio-economic disadvantage into the list of protected characteristics to prevent discrimination on the basis of this characteristic.
You can further help this campaign by sponsoring it
The Ban Benefits Discrimination petition to Secretary of State for Justice was written by Stuart Jeffery and is in the category Human Rights at GoPetition.