Brexit Wars Part II: Conservatives Plan Britain’s Exit From European Human Rights Treaty

LONDON — For years, UK Conservatives seeking support from the right have idle threats floated remove Britain from Europe’s main human rights treaty. This time, they might really mean it.

As a steady stream of undocumented migrants continues to wash up on UK shores, British ministers are running out of ideas on how to deliver on Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s totemic promise to “stop the boats”crossing the English Channel.

And with Sunak’s landmark deterrent plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda still embroiled in the courts After a spate of human rights claims, a growing number of Tories want Britain to take a more radical step: abandon the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) entirely.

It would be a seismic decision. Britain was one of the driving forces behind the drafting of the ECHR in 1950, and Winston Churchill hailed his charter as “central to our movement.” Today, the only European nations that are not members are Russia (expelled last year after invading Ukraine) and its closest ally, Belarus.

But a growing number of influential Conservatives say the ECtHR (and its enforcement body, the European Court of Human Rights, in Strasbourg) are outdated institutions preventing Britain from securing its borders in an era of mass migration.

Nick Timothy, a former senior adviser to former Prime Minister Theresa May, who will become a Conservative MP next year. wrote this month that leaving the ECHR is “vital” to British interests. Timothy has worked as an independent consultant to the current Home Secretary of the United Kingdom, Suella Braverman, who also supports the departure of the ECtHR.

“The European Court in Strasbourg blocked the first flights to Rwanda,” he wrote. “ECtHR rights have blocked the deportation of terrorists and countless criminal aliens… If we want a functioning immigration system, we must be prepared to leave.”

Dominic Cummings, another former Downing Street aide and mastermind behind the pro-Brexit Vote Leave campaign in 2016, also advocated leaving the ECtHR in his Widely Read Substack Blog this month.

Braverman is the only cabinet minister have publicly supported the departure of the ECtHRbut multiple reports over the summer Make it clear that other Conservative ministers are privately voicing their support for the idea.

The conservatives are misfollowing labor in opinion polls and urgently need to galvanize support ahead of next year’s general election.

“My (local Conservative) councilors would love it, my residents, most of them, would be very supportive as there is a strong connection between that and voting for Brexit,” said a former cabinet minister, who represents a position strongly supporter of Brexit. support constituency.

Back to the Brexit wars?

But as with Brexit, the British are divided on the need for such a sweeping move. In more liberal parts of southern England, Conservatives fear the move could backfire.

“If you face the (central) Liberal Democrats, say in Winchester or Colchester, that will cost you your seat,” warned the former minister quoted above.

A recent poll by the More In Common think tank found that half of voters think Britain should remain a member of the ECtHR, with the other half roughly split between those who think Britain should leave (28 per cent) and the undecided (23 percent).

And 41 percent said a Conservative pledge to drop the ECtHR would make them less likely to vote Conservative, while just a quarter (26 percent) said it would make them more likely to.

“The thought of going back to the ‘Brexit wars’ fills people with dread,” said Luke Tryl of More in Common. “They just don’t want to talk about Europe. They want to talk about purchase prices, waiting lists (from the National Health Service), that kind of thing.”

international consequences

However, some Downing Street advisers are drawn to the idea of ​​contesting an ECHR membership election, seeing an opportunity to portray their Labor opponents as weak on immigration.

Sunak himself is skeptical, given the likely international consequences for the UK.

The Western allies would not welcome a British decision to join Russia and Belarus outside the European ECHR club. And ECHR membership is already written into both the Northern Ireland Good Friday peace deal and the UK’s post-Brexit cooperation agreement with the EU.

Joelle Grogan, senior UK researcher at a Changing Europe think tank, said leaving the ECtHR would put the UK in “non-compliance” with the Good Friday Agreement, and that the newly signed legal and judicial cooperation with the EU was likely to would fail. More generally, she warned, Britain’s international human rights credibility would be ruined.

“It would certainly fundamentally undermine improving relations with the EU, because it would surely violate a very fundamental agreement on the island of Ireland,” Grogan said.

It would be a tough pill to swallow for Sunak, who has worked hard since taking office last October to rebuild relations with Europe. your calling Windsor Framework Agreement with the EU is considered one of the greatest achievements of his tenure as prime minister so far.

For this reason, many colleagues believe that the prime minister will resist calls for a full commitment to abandon the ECtHR.

“This is not about performance art, this is about serious decision-making,” said Robert Buckland, a former conservative attorney general and outspoken critic of calls to abandon the ECtHR. “I know the prime minister believes in that. He is a serious person and he believes in doing serious politics.”

supreme decision

But if at the end of this year the Supreme Court rules that Sunak’s plan in Rwanda is illegal (because of Britain’s obligations under the ECHR), the pressure on the prime minister will mount.

It is “very likely” that more Conservative MPs and even sitting ministers will call on Sunak to act, said a former Conservative strategist who still has strong ties to the party. An adverse court ruling would also give “more ammunition” to members of the secret team who already defend the measure, he said.

And many Conservatives see the need to draw a clear dividing line with their Labor opponents ahead of the next election.

It’s a “dispute we want to have with the Labor Party,” the strategist said, noting that Labor leader Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, is unlikely to follow through on that promise.

A second former conservative strategist, such as Cummings, a veteran of the Vote Leave campaign, suggested that Sunak could offer a referendum on ECHR membership, saying they were extremely confident in the result.

“That’s the kind of campaign one would want to be involved in,” they said. “Either you are on the side of the people who are trying to control our borders or you are on the side of the European judges in Strasbourg. It wouldn’t even be close. We would win 70/30 or 80/20.”

The Labor Party is watching nervously, having so far tried to avoid directly opposing Sunak’s harsh rhetoric on immigration.

A Starmer aide acknowledged that the ECtHR issue had “potential salience” and said the Conservatives were likely to win the backing of the “right-wing press” in any campaign. But they were skeptical that Sunak could turn it into a “saleable policy.”

In the 2019 election, fought on a “get Brexit done” divide, the Conservatives had behind them the “genius of Cummings and the sheer personality and strength of (Boris) Johnson,” the Labor strategist said.

“This time they have a Prime Minister who is a lousy activist and not really committed to it… You can’t run a campaign that is so much about abandoning the ECtHR as about stable competition.”

beyond the altar

Even if Sunak resists pressure to take the plunge and become a member of the ECHR, his right-wing colleagues will not give up the fight.

Because if the polls come back and the Conservatives lose the next election, the party is likely to find itself in the middle of another leadership contest soon after.

And rank-and-file conservative members who would pick the next leader would likely swoon over candidates offering a hardline stance on ECtHR membership.

Braverman made no secret of his ambitions to lead the party in 2022, and his support for the exit of the ECtHR could well influence the debate next time.

Meanwhile, the conservatives can only watch Sunak and wait. As the first conservative strategist quoted above said: “The question is: does Rishi have the guts to do it?”