Emma Hutton looks ahead to this week’s Holyrood policy announcements – and says ministers must match talk with action

The summer-that-never-was of 2024 is fading.

As Holyrood resumes its business after recess, all eyes are on the Scottish Government’s imminent Programme for Government. As I write this, we are all wondering what specific commitments the first minister and his cabinet will make for the coming year.

For everyone involved in defending and extending people’s human rights, it feels hard to be optimistic about what’s coming down the line. The past few months have been particularly depressing. 

We are in the middle of a national housing emergency with 1.5 million people living in overcrowded, dangerous, unstable or unaffordable housing. And yet there is still no clear plan of action to tackle this human rights crisis. 

The recent surge in far right terror across the UK brought into sharp relief the gulf between rights in theory and rights in reality for people of colour, Muslims and racialised communities. Scotland may have escaped the racist riots seen elsewhere, but it remains a country where racist and Islamophobic hate crimes are an alarming and persistent reality.

Ministers have scrapped plans for free bus travel for people stuck in the asylum system – people who have so little and for whom this scheme would have been a lifeline. The cost of the scheme is a drop in the ocean of public spending. The cost to people of scrapping it is untold.

Emergency spending controls have been introduced with no apparent assessment of their impact on people already forced to the margins by austerity measures, sky-high living costs, and public services that have been cut to the bone.

All these short-term choices will have damaging long-term consequences on all our human rights.

These situations are all stark reminders of the distance still to be travelled before human rights are a reality for everyone in Scotland today.

A raft of international human rights laws set out how our rights should be respected, protected and fulfilled. But for too many people in everyday life, their rights remain undeniably and unacceptably out of reach. It’s a gap that reveals the uncomfortable truth: that having rights on paper is one thing, but making them a lived reality demands much more - real change, real accountability, and a collective effort to dismantle the systemic barriers that continue to hold so many back.

For years, people on the sharp end of human rights violations have given their time and energy to numerous Scottish Government consultations, roundtable discussions, and policy development processes, in an effort to change things for the better. They have relived traumatic experiences and shared ideas and suggestions for a better future. Officials and ministers have talked repeatedly of co-producing policies and practices, respecting and listening to lived experience, sharing power and embedding genuinely participatory decision-making.

But still nothing seems to change, experiences remain the same, and traumatic cycles are perpetuated.

Take racism as an example. Dozens of people shared their experience of racism in Scotland as part of the Scottish Human Rights Commission’s latest monitoring report to the United Nations on the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. As the commission notes, “many stories showed instances of a failure of public bodies to protect people from hate, harassment and often violence” and “many people saw no benefit or incentive to report what happened to them, after many years and many experiences of inaction”. Where is the Scottish Government action to change this?

Or take poverty. A serious human rights problem affecting a shocking proportion of people across Scotland. People’s rights to food, housing and social security going unrealised every day.

And yet still we wait for the Scottish Government to introduce a new Human Rights Bill to protect these economic and social rights, as well as the rights of people experiencing racism, and others.

Nearly ten years of work has gone into developing this Human Rights Bill with multiple advisory groups and task forces, and thousands of people and organisations giving their time to consultations and discussions. Now delayed, the Bill was originally intended to bring several UN human rights treaties directly into Scotland’s laws. If done properly, this new law would make them enforceable and give them teeth.

Responding to a recent letter from over 120 charities and civil society groups, the Scottish Government reiterated its “firm commitment to advancing human rights”. Despite this, there is still no revised schedule for when this crucial legislation will be introduced to MSPs. If it is not in this year’s Programme for Government, when exactly can we expect it?

We all know that money is tight. But human rights are essential entitlements that our government and public authorities have a duty to respect, protect and fulfil. They cannot be treated as a “nice to have” only when times are good.

Political choices are being made all the time about who should bear the brunt of difficult public spending decisions. And those choices don’t currently add up to a picture where people’s rights are being advanced as much as possible within the resources available.

So if the Scottish Government means what it says about its commitment to people’s human rights, it is beyond time to turn that rhetoric into legal protections.

A new Human Rights Bill for Scotland, strengthening everyone’s rights in law, is a must.

Emma Hutton is CEO of Justright Scotland