Tory leader Kemi Badenoch is threatening to leave the European Convention on Human Rights should her party get back into power (“should” is doing a lot of work there — I’m as likely to get the gig as the new Stones drummer as the Tories are to win the next election).
This is so (I think) they can deport people with (mostly) brown skin back from whence they came. The Tories claim it’s a necessary step; opponents say it’s akin to ripping the heart out of healthy democracy and leaving it to die. Or something like that.
Me, I don’t really know. You probably don’t, either. The European Convention on Human Rights sounds good and leaving it sounds bad, but I’ve no idea if it really is. Luckily, God invented search engines and the House of Commons library, so I was able to take a look.
First off, we can’t just leave the convention and have done. It’s enshrined in the Human Rights Act, which would need Parliamentary approval to be abolished.
It’s a condition of Council of Europe membership that states are bound by the convention, so we’d also leave the Council of Europe — which has nothing to do with the EU but is an international organisation of 46 member states formed after World War II.
As I’m sure you know, the convention was drafted after WW2 and the Holocaust in an attempt to protect the people from the state, to make sure such atrocities would never be repeated and to safeguard fundamental rights. The UK played an important role in its birth, with Winston Churchill a key advocate.
I set off looking for cases that went before the European Court of Human Rights, which deals with alleged breaches of the convention. Cases that have gone through UK courts can still be appealed to Strasbourg, and before the Human Rights Act, they all were. I realise most cases are dealt with by English law in English courts, but figured those that go to the European court would flag important issues.
I wondered how many cases were involved: between 1975 and 2021 there were 563 judgments concerning the UK. Most applications are deemed inadmissible. By mid-2024, the number had risen to 571 — which I make 11 a year.
I was looking for big, important cases but in passing noticed what it didn’t seem terribly effective at … er, stopping the sending of people (mostly) with brown skin back from whence they came.
For example, the court ruled no breach in cases such as the deportation of a stateless Palestinian to a refugee camp in Lebanon; the deportation of a migrant whose wife and children were British citizens, after a criminal conviction for serious fraud; the deportation of a Nigerian resident in the UK from age two; or even protecting a former UN driver and US forces interpreter who was to be removed to Afghanistan and at risk of “ill-treatment”.
So: 11 appeals a year and not necessarily a barrier to removing people.
Being a cynical soul, I then wondered what leaving the convention could mean besides allowing the Tories to deport people hither and thither. Perish the thought, but perhaps linking migrants and human rights is merely a smokescreen. What could the party that gave cronies huge sums of money for faulty PPE while ignoring genuine companies with legitimate supplies (or Nigel Farage) gain from abolishing the convention?
The most obvious is the protection of citizens.
In Big Brother Watch and Others v The United Kingdom, it was ruled that our surveillance laws infringed our citizens’ right to privacy. With the Government planning to introduce ID cards, that is obviously of no concern at all, then.
Neither presumably would be Gaughran v the UK, in which it was ruled that the indefinite retention by police of Mr Gaughran’s DNA profile, fingerprints and photograph was a disproportionate interference with his right to private life; similarly, a businessman who had his phone tapped by the police without a warrant won his case.
Or again: the indefinite, blanket retention of DNA and fingerprints from individuals who were acquitted or not charged with any crime.
A warrant is now needed for phone tapping by police and laws have changed; laws that mean the police can’t keep our data when we’re not guilty or tap our phones without good cause. That’s obviously not a bad thing — and it’s tied in with our human rights.
Importantly, for these cases to reach the European court, the Government felt that it should be able to access our data without hindrance, the police should keep data on innocent people, and phones could be tapped at whim.
Similarly, the “FT” won a case that it could not be ordered to disclose leaked documents, protecting the press’s power to hold the powerful to account — clearly the powerful wanted to know who was complaining about them, and stop them.
It’s not just freedom from surveillance that’s protected — it’s freedom of belief. The convention meant that a British Airways employee, prevented from wearing a visible Christian cross with her uniform, had had her human rights breached. BA changed its policy. What’s to stop, say, Nigel Farage – without any convention on human rights – trying to ban certain expressions of religious belief.
And it’s not just the abstract: two women complained to the police about sexual assault by a taxi driver, the notorious John Worboys. He was not brought to justice, but it turned out he had raped and/or assaulted 100 women. The women won their claim that they suffered degrading treatment because the police failed to act. The police, similarly, felt they ITALICS had done a good job.
So yes, leaving the convention might help deport a few people — but it could also quietly dismantle the personal freedoms the rest of us take for granted.
