Equality and Human Rights Mainstreaming Strategy

Accountability and transparency are inextricably linked and mutually beneficial. Accountability includes sufficient scrutiny, compliance against agreed standards and public bodies being held to account for their performance. Transparency is required to increase accountability. The free flow of information in accessible formats is the foundation of transparency. Transparency of how decisions are made and how equality and human rights informed these decisions is a vital part of this.

Scrutiny is equally integral to accountability in assessing the impacts of policies and practices on equality and human rights. Effective scrutiny empowers diverse stakeholders to raise issues, ask questions, and push for transparency, leading to increased understanding of how well accountability mechanisms are realising meaningful progress in mainstreaming.

The Scottish Government, along with the wider public sector, is accountable to the public, as well as stakeholders, for the way it carries out its functions. There is a need for accountability approaches to be constructed in a way that does not require specialist knowledge by rights holders to understand them. Therefore, the ambition for this driver for change is to drive improvement of both accountability and transparency within the Scottish Government and the wider public sector, regarding mainstreaming equality and human rights. This means ensuring that everyone in Scotland can easily access information about what affects them. This includes legislative activities, policymaking, legal provisions, policy enforcement, administrative budget, public expenditure, and other relevant political information. 

Within the Government, external accountability is achieved through key stakeholder groups, who examine policy intentions and make subsequent recommendations. Of course, this includes the Scottish Human Rights Commission and the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Accountability is also achieved through:

• Scottish Public Services Ombudsman
• Complaints bodies such as Care Inspectorate and Healthcare Improvement Scotland
• Audit Scotland
• Scottish Fiscal Commission
• Reporting on equality and human rights progress as requested by United Nations, through mechanisms such as the Universal Periodic Review.

Internally, Scottish Government has established various mechanisms to ensure accountability, monitoring and transparency around equality and human rights. These include:

• The role of Accountable Officers, who have personal responsibility to monitor proper management of public funds and compliance with regulations, which includes equality and human rights.
• Publishing Equality Impact Assessments.
• Budget monitoring through the various mechanisms above, as well as the Equality and Fairer Scotland Budget Statement.
• Various Human Rights reporting mechanisms as described above.

The Human Rights Bill will introduce a specific human rights remit for scrutiny bodies, to require them to take steps to help those bodies which they oversee and who are subject to the core duties in the Bill, to fulfil these duties. This will maximise the scope for these bodies to add value as part of such a multi-institutional model of protecting the rights in the Bill, and allow them to play a role in embedding a human rights culture across the public sector. The Bill will also expand the powers of the Scottish Human Rights Commission and the Children and Young Person’s Commissioner to, amongst other things, raise and intervene in civil proceedings as well as conduct investigations.