The thing about human rights – as highlighted in the title of the first such international commitment to them, the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 – is that they are, indeed, “universal”. They are for everyone and for all time.
The 1951 European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) campaign, which Winston Churchill was a leading figure of, gave them, on our continent, some force in law. The Human Rights Act of 1998, passed by the Blair government, then made them more accessible through the British courts – British, not “foreign” judges, can adjudicate (albeit with the possibility of appeal to the multinational European Court).
They are not, therefore, supposed to be subject to the rule of the Overton window of slowly shifting “respectable” opinion. They are for all time in all places for all people.
Opinion polls are not supposed to come into it. Indeed, that’s the whole point; they are there as an immutable barrier to the kind of populist movements or coups that can lead to freedom-crushing fascism or communism. Human rights are supposed to be inconvenient to governments and contrary to the “will of the people” – and an international constraint on any domestic political system captured by demagogues and dictators.
So what’s happening now – the mainstreaming of the view that the ECHR is no longer workable or needed – is deeply depressing. Unless you’re one of those people who think that, by some divine law, the UK uniquely can never fall to autocracy because of its ancient traditions and protections. Not so. And it’s a pity that Lords including Jack Straw, David Blunkett and Malcolm Rifkind – along with some Red Wall Labour MPs, led by Jo White in the archetypal seat of Bassetlaw – wish to partially derogate from some clauses, temporarily suspend or entirely scrap the UK’s membership.
It feels that Kemi Badenoch will follow shortly, and, of course, Nigel Farage has always wanted out of anything “European”. Even Tony Blair, ex-human rights lawyer and the man who “brought human rights home” in the 1998 legislation, thinks it’s out of date and poorly equipped to deal with the challenge of this century.
In fact, ever the pragmatist, Blair has held this belief for a surprisingly long time. Back in 2003, as prime minister during a similar moral panic about migrants, he declared of his own Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act: “If the measures don’t work, then we will have to consider further measures, including fundamentally looking at the obligations we have under the convention on human rights.”
Well, he was wrong then, and he’s wrong now. The “emergency” is overdone. Irregular arrivals numbers are lower than in, say, 2022 – a modest figure in absolute terms, at 50,000, and small in relations to much higher regulated lawful migration, which would be untouched even by the Farage plans for ECHR.
The fears about crime and terrorism are also exaggerated. Any serious crime, including sexual offences, should be prosecuted with the full force of the law – whether that’s someone fresh in from Eritrea or who can use an ancestry website to prove their DNA is 100 per cent from these shores. Crime is crime, and sexual molestation is intolerable, in any colour.
But even if the worst possible slant is placed on the asylum-seekers – that they’re all “fighting age men”, sex-crazed illiterate killers, ready to milk the benefits system, take our jobs and bomb our trains – then abolishing the ECHR would make no difference. As people such as Farage stress, we still have our Magna Carta rights, the Bill of Rights, and common law to protect us.
Suspending human rights only applies to “illegal migrants”. Well, up to a point. Take habeas corpus, the right to freedom under the law, which predates Magna Carta. Should anyone be subject to being detained by the police on no charge indefinitely and even deported with no “due process”. How can that be done without someone at some point being brought before a court to verify that they are not a British citizen or a legal immigrant – and, therefore, lawfully subject to such arbitrary detention?
Without such a safeguard, anyone could be “detain and deported” off the street if a copper says so. At some point you have to be be given the right to say you are a citizen, and prove it. That is only a safeguard for everyone if it applies in all circumstances, to everyone. Without that, you have the danger of a police state and being sent to some pliant foreign country on the whim of a Reform UK minister.
Last, while it would certainly speed up removals, it would make no difference to the average asylum-seeker readying themselves for the journey across the English Channel. All it means, as with most of these draconian measures, is that an asylum-seeker, or economic migrant, for that matter, no longer has any incentive to try to claim asylum, because they would indeed be sent back summarily.
But the incentives to come to the UK remain – whether fleeing for your life or the chance of starting anew. There would simply be another switch in the tactics of the people smugglers towards entirely clandestine arrivals on the English coast, in the dead of night, undetected and entirely out of control. Or you could simply overstay a work, visit or student visa, and spend the rest of your days evading the authorities, working and living in a criminalised grey economy. Not ideal.
So we really don’t have any need to abolish the ECHR or suspend any other rights to cope with an admittedly intractable problem. We simply need faster processing and a system of ID cards that can detect all those irregular migrants who have no right to be here, and who have not arrived on small boats anyway. But, ironically, people such as Farage say that ID cards offend our human rights, which they actually don’t.
I’d have much more time for the politicians who want out of the ECHR if they just said that the reason they want to do so is because of public opinion and they want to get elected next time. They could simply argue that the British people plainly don’t like all this immigration, because they feel their culture, jobs, or safety is being attacked, and they would rather not have it – probably not even most of the legal stuff except the odd football player. That, at least, would be wrong, and still a betrayal of the British people, but honest.
Overton window or not, it’s dishonest to pretend that human rights are a “problem” and getting rid of them is the key to reducing any kind of migration. It’s a lie.
