ECHR was set up to stop another Hitler… not as a criminals’ charter – it is time that UK leaves to control immigration
WHEN Conservative MPs toy with the idea of Britain withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights, it is treated by their opponents as a symptom of their drift towards the far right.
According to Nick Thomas-Symonds, Paymaster General in Keir Starmer’s cabinet, it would turn Britain into a “pariah state”, giving encouragement to dictators all around the world that human rights no longer matter.
But hang on, what is this about a senior German politician now calling for his country to consider leaving the ECHR if it continues to block moves to control illegal migration?
According to Jens Spahn, who served in Angela Merkel’s government for six years, “it is not ordained by God that we have to be a member”.
Absurd ruling
In spite of calling himself a “convinced multilateralist”, he says that the European Court of Human Rights — which applies the ECHR — has started to interpret the right to asylum in a far looser way than was even intended by the lawyers who drafted the Convention in the 1950s.
So it turns out that leaving the ECHR isn’t the preserve of a few nutty Tory MPs after all.
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Spahn is no extremist. He is a member of the Christian Democratic Union, Germany’s centre-right party, which has been in power for most of the past 40 years, during which time it has been a strong advocate of greater European integration, through the European Union as well as other supranational bodies.
If the CDU is thinking of giving up on the ECHR then there is something seriously wrong with the court.
When it was established in 1959, the ECHR was indeed a noble exercise.
Born out of the wreckage of a Europe which had succumbed to fascism, it was conceived as a means of keeping a guard over any government which sought to suppress the rights of citizens.
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A future Hitler, went the thinking, could be stopped in his tracks.
The ECHR remained a noble venture for the first two decades of its existence. But then it subtly began to extend its remit.
Under something called the “living instrument doctrine”, judges in the European court started to adapt the human rights convention, adding numerous protocols supposedly to bring it up to date.
Another way of putting it is that activist judges started effectively to make up the law as they were going along, creating new rights without any democratic mandate.
In a functioning democracy, our elected representatives make the law and the courts uphold it. The ECHR, by contrast, sits in judgment over the law itself.
That is why we have ended up with the outrage of convicted Albanian drug dealers being forbidden from being deported from Britain on the grounds that they have supposedly acquired the “right to a family life” in Britain by virtue of getting a woman pregnant.
The high-minded lawyers who drafted the Convention in the 1950s would be turning in their graves if they knew how it was now being used.
They were certainly not intending to write a charter for serious criminals.
It is why, too, we have ended up with the European court’s absurd ruling that the Swiss government infringed the rights of elderly citizens who felt uncomfortable about going outside during a heatwave.
The government was to blame, apparently, because it had caused the hot weather by failing to set an adequate net zero target.
You don’t have to be a conservative politician to see what is wrong with this. Even some senior lawyers have had enough.
Last year, former Supreme Court judge Jonathan Sumption added his weight to the call for Britain to leave the ECHR.
The court, he argued, has devalued the concept of human rights by extending them to areas such as planning law and employment law which should properly be matters for politicians.
Human rights, he added, can adequately be enforced through our own courts. We don’t need to be members of the ECHR.
Recklessly abandoned
It isn’t just Germany, either, which is losing faith — although other countries for now tend to stick simply to ignoring the ECHR’s judgments.
Britain has been far more obedient towards it than most. We have enforced 96 per cent of the judgments handed down against us, compared with 92 per cent in the case of France, 89 per cent with Germany and 83 per cent with Denmark.
The court has done nothing to rein in dictators like Putin. Russia was a member of the ECHR until it was suspended after the invasion of Ukraine — all the while its leadership was merrily bumping off dissidents.
German government ministers have already floated the idea of processing asylum seekers in Rwanda, using facilities which were funded by UK taxpayers before Keir Starmer recklessly abandoned the Rwanda scheme without any other workable solution to control illegal migration.
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It seems that where the British Conservative party leads, its German equivalent follows.
Leaving the ECHR in order to properly control illegal migration — as well as to tackle the criminals currently sheltering under various judgments of the court — is an idea whose time appears to have come.