What will new human rights legislation mean in concrete terms for trade unionists? The answer is, we're not quite sure.

When the Human Rights Act (HRA) finally reached the statute books last autumn, you could have been forgiven for wondering exactly what was going on.

On the one hand, there were commentators in the media declaring it "the biggest change to UK law in more than 300 years" (as The Guardian newspaper did on its front page). On the other, the Government itself was rejecting such enthusiastic hyperbole in favour of good old British understatement. Official newspaper advertisements from the Home Office were headlined: "You'll probably never need it, but it's nice to know it's there."

Time will tell which of them got closer to the truth. The big question for trade unionists is: will the new law present workers and trade unions with new opportunities for a fairer deal in the workplace?

Better Late Than Never
In a nutshell, the HRA incorporates the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law for the first time since it was drafted - mostly by British lawyers - in the aftermath of the Second World War. Britain ratified the Convention in 1951, but for the next 50 years, anyone seeking to prove it had been infringed had to take their case to the Court of Justice in Strasbourg - a lengthy and expensive process.

Now the HRA is set to safeguard the provisions of the convention by making them more accessible - from now on, complaints can be lodged with the domestic courts. Already, the new law has been welcomed by the TUC, with delegates to last year's Congress congratulating the government "for giving British workers rights they have been denied for 50 years."

But what it will all mean in practice is still unclear, and set to stay that way for the next few weeks, months or even - possibly - years, according to GPMU deputy general secretary Tony Burke. "It is likely to be some years until a decent body of case law has developed, before trade unions will be able to advise members with any degree of certainty on how their collective and individual employment rights will be affected under the Act," he predicts.

Serious Consequences
However, there are very serious political consequences to losing a case under the new Act, since this could grant a degree of legitimacy to the very practices unions might be seeking to overturn. It's for this reason that the GPMU is backing the TUC policy of waiting until the right case is found before pursuing any litigation. The TUC is concentrating on finding a case of clear anti-gay discrimination, in order to use the HRA to establish legal support for freedom from workplace discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation for the first time in UK law.

"The HRA does not provide protection for individuals in every aspect of their working or private lives," argues Steve Cottingham from the labour law firm, Thompsons. "While the legislation does represent a cultural shift towards individual rights and, to a lesser extent, collective rights, it is not the answer to all of the problems experienced by British trade unionists," he says. "There is still no substitute for joining a union and taking part in its activities."