Sir Keir Starmer is certainly well-equipped for the task of dealing with the abuse of human rights laws and, thus, easing the migration crisis. Before politics, which he’s keen to remind us he entered comparatively late in life, he had been an extremely successful human rights lawyer – he has indeed “written the book”.
He won a prestigious award for his considerable pro bono work in challenging the death penalty in various Commonwealth nations, and as director of public prosecutions he dealt with many high-profile rights-related cases, such as the murder of Stephen Lawrence and, as he told his party conference this week, the victims of the Hillsborough tragedy.
So, on the “Nixon goes to China” principle, there is no one who should be more trusted with reforming human rights law than Sir Keir himself. As with the anti-communist Richard Nixon embracing Mao Zedong, the prime minister’s followers can be sure that someone with such an unassailable reputation will not betray them.
The prime minister does not approach the challenge as someone who wants, in his words, to “tear down” all the many international rights conventions to which Britain is a signatory, and in the case of the 1951 European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), where the UK was a driving force, he approaches it as someone who has devoted most of his life to the cause, and who now wants to make the structures work better and in the national interest.
As he adds, if the UK exits all such conventions, it would make securing returns agreements with other countries much harder – and it would be the wrong thing for a liberal democracy to do in any case.
In that context, it is telling that his suggestion that the application of certain parts of the ECHR by the British courts must be revisited has not been met with howls of fury from sections of his own party. They know that Sir Keir cares about human rights with every fibre of his being, and they can see that what he is cautiously proposing is no more than is necessary to face down misuse and maintain confidence in the system.
Without that, within a few years, a Reform UK government will dismantle the system used to defend human rights as we know it. They have said as much. Sir Keir is a politician as well as a passionate advocate for human rights. He is right to respond to public concerns and, on this and on other issues, take the fight to Reform.
The British public is plainly not satisfied, in particular with the way asylum seekers convicted of serious crimes can use the convention to avoid transfer to their home countries because prison conditions there are worse, or to advance spurious claims about torture.
Neither is Sir Keir content with the situation. It’s rumoured he has been quietly reviewing the ECHR for some months, and in his new home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, another lawyer and former lord chancellor, he has chosen someone who is determined to fix the asylum system more generally and defuse the issue of immigration in British politics.
If it were easy to reform human rights laws, it would have been done by now. While he was prime minster, Rishi Sunak made it unlawful to claim or process a claim for asylum in the UK where the person had arrived by irregular means – usually on a small boat crossing the English Channel. Domestic law was adjusted, but the right to claim asylum remained an absolute and universal human right under the ECHR. All that happened was that a vast backlog of asylum cases built up. Hotels had to be requisitioned to accommodate people while they awaited deportation to Rwanda. This scheme lacked the capacity to take them and was then scrapped. Nor did Sunak’s 2023 Illegal Migration Act prevent appeals to the European Court of Human Rights. It was the worst of all worlds, and a lesson in how reforming international human rights can lead to troublesome unintended consequences.
Sir Keir will try to avoid such a fate in his own reforms and has more chance of making them work. Because of his own record, he commands the support of his own party and all those who cherish the concept of universal human rights with an external right of appeal and international watchdogs.
Ideally, the Council of Europe, the international governing body of the ECHR, should update the convention, but that seems unlikely on any politically realistic timeframe. It might, though, be possible, as happened in a previous dispute over the right of prisoners in Britain to vote, to eventually reach a compromise. Either way, it is obvious that to save the ECHR from abolition in Britain by some future populist government of the right, it has to be reformed. Sir Keir and Ms Mahmood are the right people for the job.
