Those looking to further the cause of land reform and community ownership in the Highlands will be anxiously studying proposals to replace the Human Rights Act with a British Bill of Rights.
These are expected to feature in the Queen's Speech today. The issue of human rights has increasingly been deployed in the debate about the future of Scotland's land recently. Initially it was the landowners who saw the provisions of the original Scottish land reform legislation - the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 - as an infringement of their fundamental rights, in particular giving crofting communities the potential to force a land sale against the owners' wishes. Comparisons were drawn with land grabs in Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe. These were repeated last week by Lord Astor, Samantha Cameron's step-father, who is concerned for his family's 20,000 acre estate on Jura, under the forthcoming land reform bill.
The owner of the Pairc Estate on Lewis very publicly mounted a legal challenge to the original land reform legislation, founded on his human rights being infringed. However it was dismissed by three judges headed by the Lord President, Lord Gill.
But in the last year or so, the argument has been developed that it is not only proprietors who have human rights in respect of the land they bought or inherited. Local communities have a right to aspire to make the land work better for them.
Professor Alan Miller, chairman of the Scottish Human Rights Commission, has written on the subject, which has been enthusiastically pursued by Community Land Scotland (CLS), the umbrella organisation for community buyouts such as Assynt, Knoydart and South Uist, whose contribution to the affairs of the land is increasingly significant.
What is intriguing is how it also informs the Scottish Government's thinking on the subject. This was clear when Aileen McLeod, Minister for Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform, addressed last week's CLS conference in Inverness.
She said: "The way we think about governance of land, and any land reform, needs to correspond to the values we hold in society - those of social justice and equality - and reflect human rights and public interest.
"Social justice is about fairness. It's also about ensuring that people can access the resources they need to provide their families with secure places to live, to engage in meaningful work and to contribute to society."
Chartered accountant Lorne McLeod, a respected figure in the land reform movement who is CLS's new chairman, spoke in similar vein at a conference on land reform in Perth yesterday:
"Human rights dimensions of land reform are growing in intensity across the world and the work we are doing in Scotland is seen as progressive and important steps in modernising our approach to how land is owned, governed and used."
But the Tories are traditional allies of landed interests, and will hardly rush to embrace community aspirations in any Bill of Rights. It all provides for a peculiarly Highland angle on the Queen's Speech and the forthcoming fight over human rights.
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