Labour's Tony Blair

LONDON, Oct. 1 -- England gets its first domestic bill of rights on Monday in a fiercely debated move that is likely to fundamentally reshape the centuries-old relationship between the citizens and the government. The change comes with the scheduled enforcement of the Human Rights Act, a centerpiece of the Labor government's legislative program, which for the first time incorporates the European Convention on Human Rights into English law. "It is a very significant departure," said Julian Knowles, an international human rights lawyer at Matrix, a law firm in London. He said England would now have a written bill of rights enshrined in a single document and containing the same sort of guarantees that Americans have had since 1791. "We have always trusted the executive and judiciary to protect our rights, but it's been a matter of trust only," he said. "This document sets out in clear terms what these right are."

As far back as 1215, Magna Carta began to define the limits of the powers of Britain's rulers. But Britain does not have a written constitution, nor an American-style bill of rights. Instead, its citizens have always had what are known as negative rights -- that is, they have been allowed to do anything they want, unless there is a law specifically forbidding it. "We've never had positive rights," said Jenny Watson, deputy director of the Human Rights Act research unit at King's College London. "We've always relied on the silence of the law. If the law doesn't say that you can't do it, you can do it. But we started finding that rights we thought we had were cut back. "What we are getting now for the first time ever are rights that are ours, that are written down, that are easy to understand, that you can teach in schools and that you can enforce in courts," she said.

But the human rights law, which the Labor Party championed in opposition, has provoked an enormous amount of controversy as the country prepares for it to take effect. The judicial system is bracing itself for a flood of new legal challenges to laws governing areas like the news media, employment practices, the immigration service and the criminal justice system. And the government has been furiously preparing for the law's effect by training its judges and setting aside about $88 million to pay for the new cases. Many conservatives are terrified that it will wreak havoc with many of England's treasured institutions, giving too much power to interest groups like gays, minorities, criminals and women at the expense of government authority.

Britain signed the European convention in 1953 but because of a lack of political enthusiasm has not made it a part of domestic law until now. The convention sets out a range of positive rights like the right to freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial and the right to privacy. In the past, Britons who felt that their rights had been violated by the government or by public authorities had to take their cases to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, an arduous process that could drag on for as long as five years. Over the years, the Strasbourg court has ruled against Britain in a number of high-profile cases, forcing the government to rewrite British law time and time again. Among a host of other things, Britain has been forced to outlaw corporal punishment of children in schools, to limit its use of telephone wiretaps and to abandon its policy of banning gays from serving in the armed forces.

Human rights lawyers say there are a number of areas of English law that might be vulnerable to challenges under the new act. One law likely to be challenged on free- speech grounds is the Official Secrets Act, a sweeping measure that makes it a criminal offense to disclose any aspect of government work unless the disclosure has been officially authorized. Similarly, there are also expected to be a challenges to various aspects of the country's stringent libel laws, and to laws setting out when it is appropriate for judges to issue restraining orders on newspapers.

In criminal justice, there is likely to be a challenge to the right of the Home Office, rather than the judiciary, to determine actual jail time for murderers sentenced to life in prison. And much of the Blair government's own legislation covering asylum seekers, suspected soccer hooligans, suspected terrorists and the like will also probably be challenged on human rights grounds. "In almost all areas of our law, there are particular issues that people will want to challenge using the human rights act as a new tool," said Anne Owers, director of Justice, a British human rights group. "But nobody really knows how it's all going to fall out. It's going to be quite a shake-up."

Indeed, no one can say how many of the expected challenges are likely to succeed. Already, decisions in several courts have specifically referred to the human rights convention. In Birmingham, for example, a judge threw out a case against two men charged with speeding on the ground that requiring them to declare who was driving the car at the time violated their right against self- incrimination. In Scotland, which incorporated the Human Rights Act into its own law earlier this year, some 60 cases of 600 have actually been successful. The new act extends the incorporation to English and Welsh law.

Meanwhile, conservative-minded newspapers have printed a stream of articles saying in effect that the act will upend everything from the ability of teachers to prohibit their pupils from having gay sex in school, on the ground that it would violate the students' right to freedom of expression, to the right of the government to ban polygamy, on the ground that it would violate some people's freedom of religion. Opponents of the change are also concerned, they say, that the new law will force the government to cede too much of its power to the judiciary, which has traditionally been subordinate to the executive. "Our Parliament will be powerless to stop unelected and unsackable judges making the law because the Human Rights Act is so loosely and vaguely worded," wrote Norman Tebbit, a former minister in the Thatcher government, in the Daily Mail. "They will give rights to some people ? sex perverts, illegal immigrants, and criminals are top of the list ? which will rob us of freedoms we have had for centuries."

But Jack Straw, the home secretary, has been at pains to argue otherwise, pointing out that the rights under the convention are all meant to balance one another, rather than be considered as absolute rights on their own. "Nearly all the rights in the convention, except the `absolutes' against torture and slavery, are qualified or limited in some way," he wrote in The Guardian. "They reflect a vision of a human rights culture in which individuals, while exercising their rights, still have an obligation to act responsibly to others and to the wider community."

Geoffrey Robertson, a human rights lawyer at Doughty Street, a law firm, said that for a people with a stirring civil liberties tradition, Britons have been surprisingly acquiescent as their own rights have been diminished by government encroachment. "Britain is perhaps the country in the world that's produced the greatest rhetoric about liberty, from people like Milton and John Locke and Shakespeare, without giving people the rights that the poets and playwrights have articulated so forcefully," he said. "This will give people a new weapon to deploy against bureaucracy, and will help produce a better culture of liberty here."