Research Data Leeds Repository

Declarations of Incompatibility under the Human Rights Act 1998

Citation

Wallace, Stuart (2026) Declarations of Incompatibility under the Human Rights Act 1998. University of Leeds. [Dataset] https://doi.org/10.5518/1931

Dataset description

This dataset contains every declaration of incompatibility (DoI) ever issued by courts in the UK under the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA). The information on DoIs was gathered from a range of sources up to 15 July 2026. The official government reports “Responding to Human Rights Judgments” (https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6945786872075a1d4a50898f/Responding_to_human_rights_judgments_2024-2025__web_.pdf) were used to identify cases, these were cross referenced against earlier empirical research on the first ten years of the HRA (Aruna Sathanapally, Beyond Disagreement: Open Remedies in Human Rights Adjudication (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) and searches on Westlaw for cases where DoIs were issued and the most recent cases. The judgments were categorised according to the instance at which the DoI was issued. The remedial outcomes for each case were identified and categorised according to whether primary legislation, secondary legislation, devolved legislation or remedial orders were used to address the incompatibility. The specific sections of legislation subject to a DoI are noted. Further analysis of these sections was undertaken using Westlaw’s legislation database to determine when the section subject to a DoI was enacted so that the legislation could be sorted into pre-HRA and post-HRA groups. Searches of bills.parliament.uk and parliament’s website determined whether the legislation subject to a DoI had been subject to a positive statement of compatibility under s.19(1)(a) or a negative statement under s.19(1)(b). Further analysis of the cases determined with which articles of the ECHR the legislation was incompatible and coded them. Every Joint Committee on Human Rights report on the post-HRA legislation was gathered through searching the JCHR’s website and other parliamentary records. These reports were then analysed to determine whether the JCHR had identified the issue which gave rise to the DoI. The cases were then placed in one of three categories - No ID (the JCHR had not identified the specific issue giving rise to the DoI), No Opportunity (the JCHR had no opportunity to analyse and report on the legislation subject to the DoI, usually because it was passed too quickly) and Identified (the JCHR had identified the specific issue giving rise to the DoI).

Keywords:

"human rights", "declaration of incompatibility", HRA, "human rights act", violation, breach, european convention on human rights, united kingdom,

Subjects:

M000 - Law > M100 - Law by area > M110 - UK legal systems

Divisions:

Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Law

Related resources: