Will UK leave the ECHR?
We can expect plenty of talk as the election approaches, but that’s all
It was not difficult to predict that Tuesday’s victory for climate-change campaigners would give further ammunition to those who think the United Kingdom should now leave the European Convention on Human Rights. Rishi Sunak had already said last week that his plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda was “more important” than the UK’s continued membership.
There is, of course, no evidence that these two objectives are mutually incompatible. On the contrary, changes made to the court’s rule 39 — which I reported at the time — make it less likely that the court will again stop flights taking off.
As the former justice secretary Sir Robert Buckland told The Times, leaving the convention is not necessary for the Rwanda policy to be implemented. “Just last week we’ve seen the European court make the changes that we requested,” he said. “You engage with international institutions, you don’t withdraw from them.”
The Times reports that that at least 12 ministers who attend cabinet would oppose any move to leave, double the number who are understood by the newspaper to support leaving the convention.
Leaving the convention
Article 58 says a member state may “denounce” the human rights convention — pull out — after giving six months’ notice. In the meantime, the state remains bound by it.
We can expect a general election to be called within the next six months or so. It is utterly implausible that the government would tell the Council of Europe that the UK would be leaving on a date that may fall after the election.
So the most that this could be is a manifesto commitment. And any party making such a pledge will no doubt want to add a paragraph to its manifesto explaining how it plans to rewrite the Good Friday Agreement.
Buckland explained:
We had parts of the nationalist and republican community that did not trust the court system in the UK and that’s why the European convention was deployed as an underlying tenet of the agreement.
If you want to create further tensions in the UK and potentially damage the settlement that we have, then a withdrawal will have the effect of doing that.
As the UK judge at the human rights court said, the new requirements imposed on the UK and other Council of Europe members by Tuesday’s judgment “will prove an unwelcome and unnecessary distraction” for governments as they “address the generally accepted need for urgent action”.
But in practice it should be perfectly possible for states to persuade the court’s enforcement mechanism — which is ultimately answerable to the states themselves — that they are meeting their legitimate commitments to tackle climate change.
So why would the UK need to leave?
It is such a pleasure reading your article which sets out with clarity the current state pertaining to the threat of withdrawal from the ECHR rights afforded to citizens. Should the PM not be cognisant of his priorities to preserve basic human rights values rather than spout out soundbites in his desperate attempts to clamour for power?
Nice one, Joshua (echoing Buckland’s intervention): how indeed to so much as even feign to tackle the Good Friday conundrum if once (inanely) embarked upon the process of leaving the ECHR? That once said, I STILL yearn for good to come from this Court ruling. It is greatly to be hoped that we of the U.K. citizenry demonstrate our demands for measures to combat global warning risks through all peaceful, democratic means- AND through personal example. I am personally embarrassed about how little I had done or even seriously thought about this over decades but now and as graphic instances:
we arrived here from Birmingham in our (painfully modest) second home in remotest Sicily BY TRAIN and by ferry - two full days, rather than flying- and every time we resort to using our car (half owned with one daughter and son in law) it is after satisfying ourselves that there is no viable option - with a hierarchy of shanks’s pony, bicycle, bus or train and/or a combination- per each journey. Self- righteous? Not at all; rather in atonement for all those years when we should have been doing more.