LABOUR’S tinkering with European human rights laws is “really dangerous”, according to the head of a leading civil liberties group.
Akiko Hart, the director of Liberty, said that Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s efforts to limit the scope for judges to invoke parts of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) to quash deportation orders would merely boost the right-wing campaign to quit the convention entirely.
Speaking in an exclusive interview with The National, Hart compared Labour’s attempts to neutralise the issue to David Cameron’s doomed bid to face down Tory Brexiteers by agreeing a new deal with Europe.
Her comments came the day after Reform UK leader Nigel Farage promised a raft of reforms – including quitting the ECHR and a host of other international treaties – to enable mass deportations if he becomes prime minister.
While Keir Starmer has previously ruled out exiting the convention, Cooper is working on plans to rewrite laws to limit judges' ability to invoke people’s right to a family life and to be protected from torture in deportation cases.
Hart (above) said: “There are a few things that you could do at the moment if you left. For instance, you would find it easier to deport foreign national offenders to countries where they may be tortured, although most of what’s in the ECHR started off in our common law.
“It wouldn’t stop the boats. This idea that ECHR is the impediment to controlling our borders is a fiction if not a lie.”
But she added that reforming the ECHR would only fuel arguments to quit it altogether.
Hart said: “What I think’s been really, really dangerous to witness is the reaction to that, which has been to say, ‘Maybe ECHR is a bit of a problem and maybe we should look at reforming it here and there.’
“What you’re doing with that is something really similar to what David Cameron did with Brexit, where he went to Brussels in order to secure some kind of deal and he comes back with a big, technocratic deal and everyone’s like, ‘That’s rubbish, we may as well just leave.’ And that’s exactly what would happen here.
“If you went to Strasbourg and you either did this on a multilateral level – which frankly would take years and probably wouldn’t work anyway – or you tried to get some kind of carve-out, you’d still get your ‘chicken nuggets’ stories in the press, you’d still get your small boats coming and people would be like, ‘Well there you go, told you the small reforms wouldn’t work, we may as well just leave.’”
A recent immigration tribunal case saw Klevis Disha, an Albanian criminal, spared deportation reportedly because his son had an aversion to foreign chicken nuggets.
Keir Starmer is facing calls from big beasts of the Labour right, such as former home secretaries David Blunkett and Jack Straw (above), to revise Britain’s relationship with the human rights convention, which was drawn up in the aftermath of the Second World War to guard against the crimes of Nazism.
Straw told the Financial Times that the UK should “decouple” from the convention, claiming it was “now being used in ways which were never, ever intended when the instrument was drafted in the late 40s and early 50s”.
He added that its current use was “never anticipated when we were discussing in great detail how we incorporated human rights into British law in the mid-90s”, in the early years of Tony Blair’s first government.
Blunkett previously urged Starmer to suspend the ECHR in order to deport thousands of asylum seekers whose claims the Home Office had rejected.
The Home Office was approached for comment.
