Michael, the European Convention on Human Rights may not be immediately relevant in every case but there is no doubt that both foreign criminals and illegal migrants abuse the Convention to avoid deportation. This is even recognised by Keir Starmer, but rather than supporting the Conservative policy of withdrawing from the Convention, he proposes instead to disapply certain clauses, such as the right to family life, at least in the extreme interpretation given by the European judges. However the government has not yet published its plan. There is no guarantee in any case that the judges of the European Court, many of them judicial activists, would allow the UK to disapply any part of the Convention. And it is not clear that Labour backbench MPs would agree to any derogation from the Convention.
The ECHR seems to be a totemic issue for many on the left, uniting different strands of opinion. Remainers generally regard anything that begins with the word European as good and wise, regarding the prefix British as narrow minded and insular. Internationalists think that if the UK withdrew from the Convention it would become a pariah state, forgetting that many vibrant democracies like Australia, New Zealand and the United States have not signed up to the Convention or anything similar. And the human rights lobby believe that if the UK withdrew , British people would no longer have any rights, forgetting that many, if not all, of the rights detailed in the Convention have been enshrined in British law for centuries. Indeed the Convention was largely drafted by a British lawyer in the aftermath of the Second World War to reflect the traditions of democracies like Britain and France. |