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Marking her first 100 days as Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), Dr Mary-Ann Stephenson delivered her first keynote speech on 19 March 2026.  

Dr Stephenson set out her vision for equality and human rights at a joint event hosted by the EHRC and equality charity Equally Ours.  

Attendees from across civil society – including government officials, Parliamentarians and representatives from the legal and third sectors – were encouraged to make the case for Britain’s human rights protections in a way that connects with people’s lives. Dr Stephenson urged those in attendance to join the EHRC in committing to renewing public trust in human rights.  

In addition to the Chair’s keynote speech, the audience heard from the chief executives of the EHRC, John Kirkpatrick, and Equally Ours, Ali Harris. They were joined on the panel by the Chief Executive of the British Institute of Human Rights, Sanchita Hosali, for a Q&A session. Stakeholders then took part in roundtable discussions, reflecting on ways to better protect and promote human rights. 

Background

The full transcript of Dr Stephenson’s speech can be found below. 

Good morning, and thank you for being here.

When I took up the role of Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission last December, I made a commitment to working collaboratively to ensure that everyone in Britain from every background and walk of life can live with dignity and fairness. Over the past 3 months, I have spent a great deal of time meeting organisations that speak to the everyday challenges and barriers to achieving that vision. The stories are different, the circumstances are different, but the principle is the same. Human rights belong to everyone.  

Those conversations have reinforced the importance of not just the EHRC’s role, but our collective responsibility to make the case for equality and human rights in a way that connects with people’s real lives.

So it’s a real pleasure to open this workshop, and in a room that brings together so much experience: colleagues from civil society and Equally Ours, lawyers and academics, civil servants, EHRC commissioners, and members of the Joint Committee on Human Rights. We are, between us, some of the people in the UK who care most deeply about equality and human rights.

And yet, that creates a bit of a challenge for me this morning.

Because I think we have to accept that those of us in this room - human rights defenders, advocates, practitioners - have not always done as well as we need to in persuading the wider public why these rights matter.

We are good at talking to each other. We are less good at talking to people who are sceptical, or simply unsure. I am not the first person to say this. The British Institute for Human Rights, Amnesty, Liberty, Just Fair, Equally Ours have all acknowledged this and done work on making human rights connect with people’s everyday lives.  

The EHRC has worked to protect and promote equality and human rights for nearly twenty years now. And that has included work on how to talk about human rights. But somehow, although we know this we (and I include myself in this) have not consistently followed through. So, while none of what I am saying is new, I think it is important to recommit to this approach.  

Because what we all know in this room is that human rights are, at their core, about how we live well together. They are a practical framework for handling everyday problems fairly, especially when we disagree. And if we want people to support that framework, we have to do better at talking in a way which resonates with people. We have to do more to talk in the language of everyday life.

Let me start with an image that is very ordinary.

Think of a typical busy morning: parents getting children ready for school, carers helping an older person wash and dress, a nurse coming off her night shift, someone catching the bus to a jobcentre appointment. Most people in those scenes are not thinking “I am now exercising my human rights.” They are thinking: “Will the GP listen to me?”, “Will my manager treat me fairly?”, “Will my mum be safe in that care home?”

But underneath those everyday worries sit some very basic needs and wants:

We want to be sure that public authorities will treat us with respect and not arbitrarily interfere in our lives.

We want to be sure that we won’t be ignored or written off because of our age, disability, race, sex, or beliefs.

And we want to be sure that we’ll have some way to put things right when the system gets it wrong.

Human rights are simply the legal expression of those expectations. They are the rules of the game that allow a diverse society to live together, peacefully, with a basic floor of dignity and fairness for everyone.

That’s why I think it’s helpful to talk about human rights not just as “protection from the worst abuses” but as the framework for living well together in the everyday.

But if that’s what human rights are, we have to ask ourselves honestly: why do so many people in Britain hear the phrase “human rights” and think of something distant, legalistic, or even threatening?

We know that human rights are under attack. And it’s easy to blame the attackers for where we are now. But I think we have to ask ourselves, why their arguments sometimes resonate in a way ours do not. And I think there are at least three reasons, and some of them are about us.

First, despite all the work on framing we still too often speak in a language that belongs in a courtroom or a seminar, rather than in a kitchen or a staff room. People do not live their lives in Articles and Protocols. They live them in school run times, rent payments, hospital appointments, and night shifts.

Second, we have been better at talking to people who already agree with us than to those who don’t. We cluster in our own networks. We explain why human rights matter to other NGOs, or to lawyers, or to parliamentary committees – all vital audiences – but we don’t do enough to listen to people who start from a place of doubt or frustration.

Third, there is a tendency – and I say this as a self-criticism – to talk as if anyone who questions human rights is either  
misinformed or ill-intentioned. That can sound like we are dismissing people’s real fears and experiences. In doing so,  
we sometimes confirm the stereotype that human rights are  
“for other people”, or that they are “against common sense”.

All of this is happening at the same time as the legal framework itself – particularly the Human Rights Act and the European Convention of Human Rights – is under sustained attack, and, perhaps more worryingly, some of the underlying values of dignity, equality and fairness are being questioned.

We do not help ourselves if our response sounds like a technocratic defence of a statute, rather than a human explanation of why this framework helps everyone, including people who might never use the words “human rights” themselves.

We all know this. But we don’t always do it.  

We need to keep reminding ourselves of the need to talk about human rights in ways that people recognise from everyday life. Let me give a few real examples, in plain language, that show what I mean. They are all stories that will be familiar to you, but are not as widely known as they need to be outside this room.  

Take the story of Craig and his son Cameron. Cameron was a young boy with serious health conditions. His dad, Craig, had to give up work to care for him and relied on Disability Living Allowance to help meet his needs. When Cameron needed major surgery, he spent over a year in hospital. After 12 weeks, the rules said his benefits would stop, because he had been in hospital “too long”. Craig thought that was unfair. He carried on his legal challenge even after Cameron died, because he knew other families would be affected. Using the Human Rights Act, he won; the law was changed so that parents are not financially punished for having a very sick child in hospital for a long time.​

That is not an abstract argument about Article this or that. It is a father saying: “The system is treating my child as if he has disappeared, and that is wrong.” Human rights were the tool that allowed him to fix it – not just for his family, but for many others.

Or consider the Hillsborough families. For years, they fought to establish the truth about what had happened to their loved ones. Eventually, they were able to use the Human Rights Act, and specifically the duty on the state to properly investigate deaths, to secure a new inquest. That inquest finally concluded that the fans were unlawfully killed and were not to blame. For those families, human rights meant the right not to have their loved ones’ memory permanently stained by a false official story.​

Another example concerns survivors of serious sexual assaults. In a case involving the serial offender John Worboys, women who had reported him to the police argued that the police’s failure to properly investigate their reports was not just poor policing, but a breach of their basic rights. The courts agreed. They held that failing to investigate such serious allegations can violate a survivor’s fundamental rights.  

Again, human rights here are not some exotic import. They are simply the insistence that women who are attacked must be taken seriously, and that the state cannot shrug its shoulders.​

Or take modern slavery. One woman, brought to the UK as a domestic worker and nanny, was subjected to years of unpaid labour and abuse. Modern slavery was not yet a specific criminal offence. When she escaped, she was initially not taken seriously. She used the Human Rights Act, which protects all of us against forced labour, to force the authorities to investigate and prosecute. Her courage contributed to a wider recognition that our laws were inadequate, and to stronger protections for others.​

If we go back a little further, think about LGBT veterans who were stripped of their medals and livelihoods because of their sexuality. One veteran, Joe Ousalice, was dismissed from the Navy, lost his medals and pension, and lived with that injustice for decades. It was only by invoking his rights – including his right to respect for private life and to be free from discrimination – that he finally secured not just redress for himself, but a scheme for others who had suffered the same injustice.​

These are the kinds of stories that make sense to people who have never read a judgment. A parent in a hospital ward. Families fighting for the truth. Survivors wanting the police to do their job. A worker escaping exploitation. A veteran seeking to have his service recognised.

When we say “the Human Rights Act matters”, these are the kinds of concrete realities we need to put front and centre. Without the Human Rights Act, none of these people would have been able to get the justice or the treatment we surely all think they should have been entitled to.

Another point we need to get better at explaining is that rights are not absolute trump cards that allow one person to impose their will on everyone else. A strength of the human rights framework, particularly under the Convention and the Human Rights Act, is that it recognises that rights sometimes have to be balanced. That is why few rights are absolute. The recognition that there can be tensions between rights, or between the way in which people think their rights should be realised is baked into the Human Rights Act.  

Sometimes that balancing happens in obvious places: courts deciding how to weigh someone’s right to free expression against another person’s right not to be subjected to hate or incitement to violence; or cases involving national security and privacy.

But much of the balancing happens quietly, every day, in public services and workplaces:

A school deciding how to accommodate a child’s religious practice while ensuring the curriculum is delivered to all.

A local authority deciding how to respect an older couple’s wish to live together when one needs residential care and the other does not.

A police force deciding how to facilitate a protest while also protecting public safety.

Many of these decisions, taken in sometimes difficult situations, never make it to court. In other cases parliament decides to restrict the rights of one group in order to protect the rights of another, for example limiting some people’s right to freedom of expression and the exercise of their beliefs in order to protect the rights of women needing an abortion not to be subject to harassment.  

Even when decisions are made to restrict rights, they are not about saying “my right wins, so yours doesn’t matter”. They are about recognising that more than one group has rights in a situation. Human rights help create a structured way to think about competing claims, to look for reasonable adjustments, to ask “have we treated this person as a human being with a life, relationships and aspirations?” That is the opposite of chaos; it is common sense, disciplined by principle.

So where does that leave us, in this room, today?

We do not control the political weather. We cannot, by ourselves, change manifestos or headlines. But there are at least three things we can do. Again, none of this is new. Many of you have been working on this for years. But I am stressing it again here because I know that we don’t always follow through.  

First, we can change the language we use. That does not mean dumbing down. It means translating. Instead of saying “positive obligations under Article 8”, we can say “the council has to take reasonable steps to keep families together where that’s possible.” Instead of “Article 3 inhuman and degrading treatment”, we can say “no one should be treated in a way that strips them of their dignity, however vulnerable they are.” Sometimes of course we need to use both. But we should avoid only using the first and forgetting the second.  

Second, we can broaden our messengers. Human rights advocates, including those of us at the EHRC, are important, but we are not always the most persuasive voices. When a parent like Craig, or a Hillsborough family member, or a survivor of violence speaks about what rights have meant in their life, that connects in a way that a chair of a commission rarely can. Part of our job is to support those voices to be heard safely and respectfully.

Third, we can be more deliberate about who we are talking to. There is nothing wrong with speaking in a way that works for this room – we need to share practice and build expertise. But we must also ask: how would this sound in a staff canteen? In a small business owners’ breakfast? In a residents’ association meeting? If the answer is “they would think this has nothing to do with them”, then we need to rethink.

I also want to emphasise something that is essential for an institution like the EHRC, and for many of the organisations represented here: this framework is not, and must not become, the property of any political party.

Yes, there are current debates about the future of the Human Rights Act and the UK’s relationship with the European Convention on Human Rights. Those debates are important. Indeed – together with the Scottish and Northern Irish Human Rights commissions – just today we wrote to the UK government on the application of the ECHR. We called on the government to commit to no reduction in rights protections. But the values those instruments embody – that all people have inherent dignity, that the state is accountable when it harms, that minorities have protections even when they are unpopular – run deeper than any election cycle.

In the past, support for the Convention and for a rules-based approach to rights has been found across the political spectrum. Many of the landmark judgments we now regard as part of our human rights story were brought under governments of different parties. And many of the people whose lives have been changed – the families at Hillsborough, the parents of disabled children, LGBT veterans, survivors of abuse – would resist being used as props in a partisan argument.

That is why it is vital that we keep making the case in constitutional, ethical and practical terms, not partisan ones. If human rights are seen as just another party-political football, then whichever “team” people support, half of them will be encouraged to see rights as something to be defeated.

Our task is to make human rights feel like what they in fact are: part of the basic plumbing of a decent society. Not the whole story of social justice, but a core part of it.

So I want to end with a challenge – first to myself as Chair of the EHRC, and then to all of us.

If we believe that human rights are about how we live well together, then we have to work harder to live that belief in how we talk about them.

We need to lead with stories that sound like real people’s lives, not just citations and sections.

We need to acknowledge where people feel let down by institutions, including by those of us in this field, and let that sharpen, not blunt, our commitment to accountability.

We need to show that human rights are about shared rules that apply to everyone, including those we dislike or disagree with, and that they can both protect individuals and help hold communities together.

Over the course of this workshop, you will be discussing how we can best make the case for human rights in the months and years ahead. I hope we can keep returning to three touchstones:

Are we speaking in language that people understand?

Are we illustrating rights with everyday examples that resonate – like Craig and Cameron, the Hillsborough families, survivors whose cases changed how police must respond, people escaping exploitation or discrimination?

And are we explaining, clearly, that one of the system’s strengths is precisely its capacity to balance rights fairly in a way that supports social cohesion?

If we can commit together to answering “yes” to those questions more often, then I think we stand a much better chance, not just of defending a piece of legislation, but of renewing public trust in the idea that everyone, without exception, has a basic claim to be treated with dignity and fairness.  

That, to me, is what human rights are for. That is how they help us live well together. And that is why the work you are doing – in government, in parliament, in law, in civil society, in communities – matters so much.

Thank you.