Professor Stuart Weir - Obituary

Professor Stuart Weir was a great friend and colleague who worked over many years at the Human Rights Centre (HRC) at the University of Essex, first as a Senior Research Fellow and then as Professor in Democracy and Human Rights and, after his retirement, as a Fellow of the HRC.

In 1991, Professor Weir co-founded the Democratic Audit project at the HRC, with funding from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust (JRCT). He worked for well over a decade as its Director, producing several published volumes on the quality of democracy and human rights protection in the United Kingdom. His approach to the assessment of the quality of democracy was deeply informed through an appeal to democratic norms, how these manifested in practice, and how it was possible to make robust judgments about the degree to which these practices lived up to expectations, as well as to international human rights standards.

Democratic Audit books included Klug, Starmer, and Weir eds (1996) The Three Pillars of Liberty: Political Rights and Freedoms in the United Kingdom (Routledge), Weir and Beetham (1998) Political Power and Democratic Control in Britain (Routledge), and Beetham, Weir and Ngan (2002) Democracy under Blair (Politicos).

His work on the Democratic Audit expanded to include international application as part of the State of Democracy project, funded by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) in Stockholm. Along with David Beetham, Weir published the IDEA Handbook on Democracy Assessment and The State of Democracy: Democracy Assessments in Eight Nations around the World (both with Kluwer Law International, 2002 and 2003). He then worked with David Beetham, Todd Landman, and Edzia Carvalho on an updated framework through a project based in the HRC entitled Assessing the Quality of Democracy: A Practical Guide (International IDEA. 2008).

In addition to his leading work assessing democracy, Professor Weir had a deep personal and professional commitment to social justice and to economic and social rights, including child poverty, on which he worked as director of a welfare rights office at Child Poverty Action Group in the 1970s, as well as homelessness. His published work included Unequal Britain: Human Rights as a Route to Social Justice (Methuen,2005), which was an important early contribution to advancing scholarship and practice on economic and social rights in the UK.

Professor Weir had a wry and engaging sense of humour, working closely with the late Professor Kevin Boyle, Professor Paul Hunt, Professor Todd Landman and other Members and Fellows at the HRC, as well as with JRCT’s Stephan Pittam, on the Democratic Audit project. His research was characterised by a strong commitment to rigour and evidence, and a meticulous and methodical commitment to assessing democracy with a view to making it better for any country that had embraced it. His methodological approach was one that was sceptical of country democracy rankings and one that focused on the actual quality of democratic practice and experience through a framework of assessment that would be used by the citizens themselves. The State of Democracy project was applied in over thirty countries and involved Essex colleagues working in Mongolia and Sweden as part of dedicated missions funded by International IDEA and the United Nations under the auspices of the various events relating to the International Conference on New and Restored Democracies.

Beyond his work with the Democratic Audit at the University of Essex, Weir had worked, amongst others, as an academic at the London School of Economics and as a journalist, including as Editor of the New Statesman from 1987-91, where he also founded the constitutional reform campaign group Charter 88.

Stuart Weir, academic and journalist, was born on 13 October 1938 and died on 2 July 2024, aged 84.

Contributions to this obituary were made by Judith Bueno de Mesquita, Iain Byrne, Professor Paul Hunt, Professor Francesca Klug and Professor Todd Landman.