We are a decent, tolerant nation – we don’t need a document written to prevent Nazi genocide to tell us how to behave
IT is good news that Government ministers are openly discussing leaving the European Convention on Human Rights.
This document was written for a different age, just after the Second World War, in response to the genocidal behaviour of the Nazis.
The original backers of the ECHR, which included Winston Churchill, never intended it would end up curtailing the sovereignty of independent democracies like the UK, giving judges in Strasbourg the power to overrule laws made in Parliament and policy set by our own elected ministers.
But that’s what has happened — especially since Tony Blair incorporated the ECHR into British law with his 1998 Human Rights Act.
Last week lawyers working for the left-wing activist group Care4Calais persuaded a judge to halt the transfer of 20 illegal migrants to the barge Bibby Stockholm.
The barge offers safe and decent accommodation which people fleeing from persecution and destitution, as they claim to be, should be happy to use.
But the lawyers used the Human Rights Act to argue that their clients would be at risk from living there, including some inexplicably suffering from a ‘fear of water’, despite their arrival in the UK in a small boat.
This is the kind of lawyerly argument we’ve come to expect from a subset of the British legal profession, as we saw in the expose last week of the solicitors telling migrants to invent claims of persecution in order to play the British asylum system.
Last month, in the face of opposition from every other party, the Government passed the landmark Illegal Migration Act.
This will require the Home Office to remove anyone who arrives in our country illegally, including via small boats, back to their own nation or to a safe third country like Rwanda.
Thanks in part to the work of New Conservative MPs the act includes clauses which stop judges in Europe or Britain from using human rights laws to prevent removals.
I sincerely hope this Act is enough to ensure we can stop the boats.
I hope the Government is right that the Strasbourg Court will see sense and respect the clearly expressed will of the British Government.
I hope judges here recognise they need to follow the direction of Parliament, rather than that of activists and their lawyers.
But if they’re wrong, we need to change the law.
That means scrapping the Human Rights Act and withdrawing from, or at least renegotiating our relationship with, the ECHR.
Supporters of the status quo — generally the same people hostile to the Government’s approach to illegal migration in general and the Rwanda policy in particular — have only one argument to defend British membership of the ECHR.
They say it is essential for our international reputation, that if we left, we’d be in the same company as Russia and Belarus, the only European countries not in the club.
Tolerant nation
That argument is absurd. If our international reputation requires us to belong to a convention that actively undermines our sovereignty and our democracy, it is a reputation not worth having. But it’s not the case.
The rest of the world admires the UK not because we are in the ECHR but because of our own, home-grown institutions, especially Parliament and our centuries-old legal system known as the common law.
These institutions created the first liberal democracy in the world and pioneered the concept of individual rights and freedoms while the countries of Europe were still living under feudalism and absolute monarchies.
We don’t need a multinational agreement to make us a decent and tolerant nation.
We are that already. We treat everyone, including illegal migrants, with decency and fair process.
We reserve the right to deport people who arrive here illegally, but we will do so with humanity and respect for their safety and well-being (for instance, we won’t return them to somewhere they’ll be persecuted again).
If we have to leave the ECHR we should do so in a way that is consistent with our traditions of human rights, and indeed our traditions of international cooperation.
Last year I said to Rishi Sunak in the House of Commons that he should emulate Winston Churchill, who helped found the ECHR in the first place.
He should help bring together like-minded countries – in Europe and across the West, including the Commonwealth – and thrash out a new framework for refugees and human rights.
The rich, safe countries of the world have an obligation to do what they can to provide refuge to people fleeing war and persecution.
The new framework would spell out how this obligation will be met in an age of mass people movements, where the line between a refugee and an economic migrant is blurred.
But all countries also have an obligation to put their own people first, and every government should be accountable only to its voters.
That’s why the new international framework we need should put at its heart the principle of national sovereignty.
In 2016 the British people voted to take back control of our country. In 2020 we got Brexit done at last.
But voters expect us to deliver the slogan in its entirety. If we have to, we should leave the ECHR. I for one would be proud to campaign on that manifesto at the next election.
