"Passing a new UK All Citizens Protection Law — for citizens, civilians and anyone with the right to remain in the UK — will fully enforce and bring together two important bills already passed in Parliament: the Equality Act 2010 and every amendment passed since the law began, along with the whole of the Human Rights Act and every protocol and article to be included. The aim is to ensure every citizen's rights are upheld, contrary to common UK law, and to prevent discrimination and the legal loopholes of professional criminalisation used against everyday people."
Britain does not have a shortage of rights on paper. It has a shortage of enforcement. Two of the most significant pieces of legislation ever passed by Parliament — the Equality Act 2010 and the Human Rights Act 1998 — already promise the everyday citizen protection from discrimination, from state overreach, and from the destruction of their private and family life. Yet both sit in separate silos, partially commenced, unevenly enforced, and routinely out-manoeuvred by common law practice, procedural technicality, and the sheer cost of going to court.
The result is a country where a person's rights depend entirely on whether they have the money, the health, and the legal representation to fight for them. The All Citizens Protection Law ends that lottery. It consolidates both Acts into a single, directly enforceable statute — one that applies to every citizen, every civilian, and every person with lawful rights to remain in the UK, without exception and without a means test.
1. Who It Protects
This is not a law for a special class of person. It is deliberately drafted to cover everybody who lives under UK jurisdiction, because a protection that excludes anyone is a loophole waiting to be exploited.
- British CitizensEvery citizen by birth, descent, registration or naturalisation, wherever they live in the United Kingdom.
- Civilians & ResidentsEvery civilian resident in the UK, whether or not they hold citizenship.
- Right to RemainAnyone with indefinite or limited leave to remain, settled or pre-settled status, or any other lawful right to be here.
- Looked-After Children & Care LeaversEvery child in the care of the state, every child in foster, kinship or residential care, and every care-experienced young person — protected by name, for life, as the tenth protected characteristic.
- The Most ExposedChildren, disabled people, the mentally unwell, the detained, and anyone whose circumstances make self-advocacy impossible.
2. The Two Pillars It Unites
The Equality Act 2010 — And Every Amendment Since
The Equality Act 2010 harmonised decades of separate anti-discrimination legislation into one statute covering nine protected characteristics. But significant sections of it were never brought into force, others have been steadily narrowed by cost, procedure and exemption — and one group the state itself is legally the parent of, looked-after children and care-experienced young people, was never named in it at all.
Fully commence and consolidate the Act in its entirety — including the provisions Parliament passed but successive governments quietly shelved, such as the dual discrimination protection and the socio-economic duty — lock in every amendment and regulation made since the Act began, and add care experience as the tenth protected characteristic, so that looked-after children, children in care and care leavers are protected by name and the whole framework can never again be weakened by simply choosing not to switch it on.
The Human Rights Act — Every Article, Every Protocol
The Human Rights Act 1998 brought the European Convention on Human Rights into domestic law — but not all of it. Key guarantees, including the general obligation to secure rights and the right to an effective domestic remedy, were left out of the Act's schedule, and several Convention protocols have never been ratified by the UK at all.
Incorporate the Convention in full: every article and every protocol written directly into domestic law, including the effective-remedy guarantee that currently forces citizens to exhaust years of UK proceedings before their rights mean anything. A right without a remedy is a slogan.
One Statute, One Enforcement Route
Today a person discriminated against by a public body may have to run parallel claims in an employment tribunal, a county court, and a judicial review — each with different time limits, different costs, and different tests. Most people give up long before the merits are ever heard.
A single statutory cause of action covering both equality and human rights breaches, with unified time limits, a duty on public bodies to disclose relevant records at the outset, and no fees at the point of access. Where the state or a corporation has breached a citizen's rights, the burden of explaining itself sits with them.
3. The Protected Characteristics — Non-Negotiable
The nine protected characteristics of the Equality Act 2010 are carried into the All Citizens Protection Law untouched and unqualified. Discrimination, harassment and victimisation on any of these grounds becomes actionable under one statute, in one forum. And the law adds a tenth: care experience — looked-after children and young people, and children in care.
Looked-After Children, Young People & Children In Care
No group in this country is failed more consistently, or has less capacity to complain about it, than children in the care of the state. They are moved between placements without warning, excluded from school at several times the national rate, pulled into the criminal justice system as teenagers for behaviour that would be handled at home in any other family, and then discharged at eighteen into housing insecurity, unemployment and poor mental health — carrying a stigma that follows them into every job application and tenancy for the rest of their lives.
The Equality Act 2010 does not name them. That silence is the loophole. A care-experienced young person turned away, talked down to, or written off can rarely point to a protected ground, so the discrimination is real but not actionable. The All Citizens Protection Law names care experience as the tenth protected characteristic, and gives it the full force of the other nine. Dozens of councils across the UK have already voted to treat care experience as a protected characteristic locally, and the Independent Review of Children's Social Care recommended it nationally. This law finishes the job in statute, so it no longer depends on the goodwill of individual authorities.
- Who is covered. Every child currently looked after — in foster care, kinship care, residential or secure accommodation, or subject to a care order — every child previously looked after, and every care leaver and care-experienced adult, with no cut-off at eighteen, twenty-one or twenty-five.
- Direct and indirect discrimination. It becomes unlawful to treat a looked-after child or care-experienced person less favourably because of their care status, in education, employment, housing, healthcare, policing, financial services or public administration — including apparently neutral rules that shut them out in practice, such as guarantor and referencing requirements no care leaver can meet.
- Harassment and stigma. Being labelled, gossiped about, or treated as inherently a risk because of a care background becomes actionable harassment, not an unfortunate attitude.
- An end to criminalising the care system. Children looked after by the state must not be handed a criminal record for incidents inside a placement that would never leave the front door of a family home. Police escalation involving a looked-after child triggers a duty to record and justify, and corporate parents must show they attempted every alternative first.
- A corporate parenting duty with teeth. The corporate parenting principles stop being guidance and become an enforceable duty owed to the child — with a positive duty on every public body to consider the impact of its decisions on looked-after children and care leavers, read alongside the socio-economic duty this law finally commences.
- Advocacy as of right. Because a child in care cannot litigate for themselves, the law provides automatic independent advocacy, legal representation without a means test, and standing for that advocate to bring a claim on the child's behalf through the single enforcement route this law creates.
- Human rights read together. A looked-after child's Article 8 right to private and family life, Article 3 protection from degrading treatment, and Article 2 of Protocol 1 right to education are enforced in the same claim as their equality rights — no more losing in the gap between two Acts.
A protection that depends on a child being able to identify the correct statute, find a solicitor, and issue proceedings before their eighteenth birthday is not a protection. Naming care experience in the law means the burden shifts to the institution: it has to justify how it treated the child, in writing, against a characteristic it can no longer pretend does not exist.
4. Every Article. Every Protocol.
The campaign's position is simple: partial incorporation is what creates the gaps. The following are to be written into domestic law in full and made directly enforceable by any citizen.
The Convention Rights
- Article 1The obligation on the state to secure these rights for everyone within its jurisdiction — currently omitted from the Act.
- Article 2The right to life, including the duty to investigate deaths in which the state is implicated.
- Article 3Freedom from torture and from inhuman or degrading treatment.
- Article 4Freedom from slavery, servitude and forced labour.
- Article 5The right to liberty and security of the person.
- Article 6The right to a fair trial before an impartial tribunal — and an end to trial by media.
- Article 7No punishment without law; no retrospective criminalisation.
- Article 8The right to respect for private and family life, home and correspondence.
- Article 9Freedom of thought, conscience and religion.
- Article 10Freedom of expression — a right of the citizen, never a shield for institutional harassment.
- Article 11Freedom of assembly and association, including the right to organise and to protest.
- Article 12The right to marry and found a family.
- Article 13The right to an effective remedy before a national authority — currently omitted from the Act.
- Article 14Prohibition of discrimination in the enjoyment of every right above.
- Articles 15–18The strict limits on derogation, on restricting the rights of others, and on any abuse of these rights by the state itself.
The Protocols
- Protocol 1Protection of property, the right to education, and the right to free and fair elections by secret ballot.
- Protocol 4Freedom of movement, no imprisonment for debt, and no expulsion of a state's own nationals — never ratified by the UK.
- Protocol 6Abolition of the death penalty in peacetime.
- Protocol 7Procedural safeguards on expulsion, the right of appeal in criminal matters, compensation for wrongful conviction, and equality between spouses — never ratified by the UK.
- Protocol 12A free-standing, general prohibition of discrimination that applies beyond the other Convention rights — never ratified by the UK.
- Protocol 13Abolition of the death penalty in all circumstances, including in time of war.
5. Closing the Loopholes of Professional Criminalisation
The most corrosive injustice in this country is not the law as written — it is the professional machinery that turns ordinary people into defendants. Institutions with permanent legal departments, procedural expertise, and public money learn exactly where the gaps sit between two Acts, and they operate in them.
Procedure Used As A Weapon
Missed deadlines, wrong forum, insufficient particularity, unaffordable costs orders. Cases with genuine merit are routinely extinguished on technicality before a single fact is examined.
A statutory presumption in favour of hearing the substance. Where a citizen's claim discloses a credible breach of equality or human rights, procedural defects are to be curable, not fatal — and adverse costs cannot be used to intimidate an individual litigant into abandoning a meritorious case.
The Accountability Gap Between Two Acts
A public body can concede it has no human rights defence while arguing the Equality Act does not apply, and vice versa. The citizen loses in the gap between the two statutes — a gap that exists purely because the laws were passed twelve years apart.
Consolidation removes the gap entirely. One statute means a public body or corporation answers the whole of a citizen's complaint at once, with a positive duty to justify its conduct against every relevant characteristic and every relevant article.
Criminalising The Complainant
Everyday people who challenge an institution too persistently find themselves recast as the problem — as vexatious, obstructive, or a public nuisance — and in the worst cases face criminal exposure for what began as a legitimate complaint. Looked-after children are the sharpest example: a teenager in residential care can leave the system with a criminal record earned entirely inside the placement the state put them in.
Explicit statutory protection against retaliatory criminalisation. Pursuing a rights complaint against a public body, employer or publisher cannot itself be treated as misconduct, and any attempt to convert a complainant into a suspect becomes a reportable breach with career-ending consequences for the officials involved. Where the person is a looked-after child or care leaver, the same protection applies to the corporate parent that escalated them into the criminal justice system instead of parenting them.
The Core Argument
Parliament has already decided that every person in this country is equal before the law and entitled to their human rights. Nobody needs to be persuaded again. The All Citizens Protection Law simply refuses to let those two decisions be undone by silence, by cost, by procedure, or by the professional habit of criminalising the very people the law was written to protect.