Human Rights Quarterly

In this article, the United Kingdom's Human Rights Act is considered as a legal transplant of the European Convention on Human Rights to the domestic system. Existing literature concerning legal transplants is applied to determine whether the problems experienced by the HRA are partly due to its status as a transplant. It is concluded that whilst the Act has not been a failure, the literature can explain some of the issues that have arisen. In particular, the UK experience demonstrates that for longevity and legitimacy, building a national human rights instrument requires more than a simple transplant from the international legal system to the national.