Rights and the post-Brexit agenda: rights protection and institutional inadequacy in the United Kingdom

Abstract

The issue of protection of rights in a post-Brexit UK has been largely absent from either the final rounds of EU/UK negotiations or the internal UK debate, other than in regard to Northern Ireland and citizen rights. The UK will leave the EU with little certainty as to how various rights, now ‘brought home’, will be protected and enforced. The protection of rights in the UK has been dependent on a multi-layered framework including EU institutions. The UK’s withdrawal from the EU will produce gaps in this overall institutional framework. Rights protection is likely to be further diluted through Brexit’s unsettling of the UK’s constitutional arrangements within its current rights-averse political environment. This article adopts an institutional approach to assess the implications of Brexit for the UK’s protection of rights. It argues that even with some regulatory alignment between the EU and the UK, inadequate institutional arrangements risk undermining current levels of protection.