 Hi everyone, thanks for joining us. I'm here with Martha Spiria, a British barrister, a human rights campaigner and the director of Advocacy Group Liberty. Hi Martha, how are you? Hi Emma, how are you doing? I'm good, thank you. So Martha, can you please describe to us what you do in 15 words or less? So I run a human rights campaigning organisation that fights for rights and freedoms for people in the UK. The government is currently in a consultation period to reform the Human Rights Act. Why is the Human Rights Act so important? The Human Rights Act is a vital tool for ordinary people up and down the country to hold the state, the government, the police, local authorities to account. It's a way that we can make sure that we even indicate our rights against the state. So what changes have actually been proposed? The most worrying are firstly a proposal to strip out Article 8 protections and those protections are the ones that are the right to a private and family life. So that affects anyone who's coming here from another country and wants to settle here, whether they're fleeing persecution or whatever. But it also affects people who are fighting for safer housing. It affects people who are trying to get their rights vindicated because they're LGBTQ for example. There are also attacks on the positive obligations, obligations that are on public authorities, authorities like the police to make sure that our rights are respected. And a proposal to whittle those away is really a gutting of the state's proactive obligation to keep us all safe and free. And then there's a whole raft of other proposals, things like needing to get permission from a judge before you can even take a human rights case. Things like having your behaviour taken into account when a judge decides what remedy you should get if you have suffered a human rights violation and a whole host of other proposals that will make all of our rights weaker. We've spoken a little bit about how those proposals affect courts, but what do those proposals mean for us in our day to day lives? Hopefully you never even know that you've been engaged in a human rights issue in your everyday life because the people who are meant to protect you and are meant to make sure that we're free and safe and equal are doing their jobs. But if the worst comes to the worst and if there's corruption, if there's abuse of power, if there's violence, then at that point, you might need to use the actual legal instrument that is the Human Rights Act in order to take a case or make a complaint. You can educate your own rights and get justice for what's happened to you, but also to force the state to learn lessons so that it doesn't happen to anyone else in future. This is quite a tough question, but if you could immediately put right one injustice in the UK right now, what would it be and why? The gateway to all rights abuses really is that the state often has power that is unchecked. And so if I could wave a magic wand, it would be to do something to make sure that those really critical checks and balances, the tools that all communities need to stand up to power, that those are put out of reach by any executive government. Do you have any ideas about how we can heal divisions in society right now? I think one of the things that we need now that we don't have is imagination and leadership. And time and again, I find it bleak and depressing to see politicians seemingly kind of follow headlines and focus groups rather than think about the world that they want to see in 10 years time and how they might get us there. And I actually think, you know, with a bit of creativity and a bit of imagination and a bit of good oratory, you can take quite a lot of people quite a long way. I don't believe that people are fundamentally, you know, anti-migrant or fundamentally wanting to go to war. You know, I think, yeah, I think there's a lot that can be done by painting people a vision that they can sign up for where there's something in it for everybody as a whole as a collective, rather than playing to people's kind of worst basest fears. There's been talk about engaging young people in human rights more. So we're interested to know what advice would you give to a 10 year old you? I think, firstly, to stay skeptical of power and people in power, but also to really pay attention to the importance of finding joy and hope and common cause along the way. So our final question, if you had 30 seconds to send a message to our audience about the Human Rights Act or one final message in general, what would you like to say? Human rights, access to justice, holding the powerful to account, these are the tenets of what makes our lives safe most of the time, free most of the time. And if you don't have those things and it's easy to take them for granted, they're not concrete, they're not obvious, they're not visible, perhaps in everyday life. But if you don't have them, that way lies a life in which no one can really flourish. And of course, on the sharpest end of it are marginalized communities and their rights, their freedoms, they will go first. But make no mistake, those communities' rights being weakened, weakens all of our collective rights, and once they come for them, they will eventually come for us too. So come together, put your differences aside, build powerful coalitions, stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity and fight for the kind of world where we're all safe, all free, and where we can truly stand up to powerful people who would otherwise perhaps take our liberties away.