Should Britain withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights?

Keir Starmer has often been accused of lacking core beliefs, said George Eaton in The New Statesman, but there's no doubting his earnest commitment to human rights law. He wrote a book on the subject back in 1999, and once claimed: "There is no version of my life that does not largely revolve around me being a human rights lawyer." Which is awkward given the current furore over irregular migration and the mounting calls for the UK to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

These calls are no longer just coming from Nigel Farage and the Tories. Two former Labour home secretaries have pitched in as well: David Blunkett says we should suspend parts of the ECHR to speed up the deportation of failed asylum seekers; Jack Straw has warned that "the convention – and crucially, its implementation – is now being used in ways which were never, ever intended when... it was drafted".

Britain's departure from the ECHR "is starting to feel inevitable", said Daniel Hannan in the Daily Mail. The only question is whether the PM accepts it, or is "swept away by the tide". Withdrawal wouldn't be such a big deal. The UK was an open, liberal society long before the ECHR came into force. Claims that leaving it would somehow destabilise the Good Friday Agreement are nonsense.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Yet there's no good reason to suspend our commitment to these universal rights, said Sean O'Grady in The Independent. For all the talk of an "emergency", irregular arrival numbers are lower today than they were in 2022 – and small in relation to the numbers settling here through legal migration. It's not as if leaving the ECHR will stop people trying to cross the Channel.

The ECHR is not the main problem with our overwhelmed asylum system, said Fraser Nelson in The Times. "Legally, Strasbourg only has as much power over our law as Parliament wishes to give it." If, for instance, politicians feel our judges are being too generous in their interpretation of the right to family life, they can legislate to tighten guidance. In practice, the ECHR's impact is modest. Although critics claim the convention stops ministers expelling foreign criminals, data from 2016-2021 shows that just 3.35% of successful appeals were on human rights grounds.

More troublesome than the ECHR is the Refugee Convention, which obliges Britain to settle everyone with a "well-founded fear of persecution" – a definition that "covers much of the world's population". This treaty doesn't present such a "juicy" political target "as it doesn't include the word 'European'", but it's the one the small-boat arrivals are mainly relying on – and the one that most needs updating.