Britain must be ready to reform international agreements
Something extraordinary has just happened. In March, Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, said that she was reviewing the way the European Convention on Human Rights was being interpreted by the courts. Three months later, no one will defend the convention as it is. Two more MPs joined the stampede to change it today: Jake Richards and Dan Tomlinson, two ambitious Labour backbenchers, have a joint article in The Times calling for "reform" of the convention. It became clear that this was not just a matter of tactical positioning in British politics when nine EU leaders, led by the prime ministers of Italy and Denmark, published an open letter on 22 May to launch an 'open-minded conversation" about the "interpretation" of the convention.
They said: 'We have seen, for example, cases concerning the expulsion of criminal foreign nationals where the interpretation of the convention has resulted in the protection of the wrong people and posed too many limitations on the states' ability to decide whom to expel from their territories." A week later, Richard Hermer, the UK attorney general, delivered a lecture that attracted attention for suggesting that Kemi Badenoch's wish to "disengage" from the European court was like legal arguments made in Nazi Germany to "put aside" international law. He had to apologise for that "clumsy" analogy, which meant that hardly anyone noticed something else he said in the lecture, namely that Britain must be ready to "reform" international agreements such as the convention so that they retain "democratic legitimacy".
A few days later, Alain Berset, the secretary general of the Council of Europe, the body that oversees the convention and its court, and which as every Brexit pedant knows is separate from the European Union, said: "We need adaptation. We need discussion about the rules that we want to have, and there is no taboo."
In just a few weeks, the debate has moved from "how the convention is interpreted" to "rewriting the convention itself". Something is happening. It is almost as if European leaders have learned from their failure to give David Cameron reforms that would have enabled him to win the referendum and keep Britain in the EU. They have realised that they need to change the ECHR in order to save it. The transformation of the politics of the issue in the UK was confirmed last week, when Ed Davey said that he wouldn't be opposed to rewriting the convention. "If you could do it collectively, working with the court, with European colleagues, yes, one could look at that," he said.
That is Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats, who fought a general election on a promise to cancel Brexit; the party that most venerates European institutions and international law. What is going on? Nigel Farage claims that he has changed the terms of the debate: that the liberal establishment is panicking because of his campaign against the ECHR. First, he forced Kemi Badenoch to harden her line, inherited from Rishi Sunak, of being prepared to repudiate the ECHR if necessary; now the government is trying to hold back the tide by reviewing the way the convention is interpreted or even amending it.
This is not the whole story. I don't think Giorgia Meloni and Mette Frederiksen were prompted to publish their open letter by Reform's success in British opinion polls. They were responding to a genuine problem that has frustrated elected leaders for a long time. I remember Tony Blair being as irritated as his first-class temperament would allow at the Chahal decision of 1996 that made it hard for him to deport various criminals and terrorists.
But the way the convention, especially article 8, the right to family life, has been interpreted, both by the European Court of Human Rights and by national courts, has become more of a problem in recent years. In Britain, the Telegraph has given the appearance of campaigning against human rights law by simply reporting a series of rulings by immigration tribunals. (Perhaps the most eye-catching use of the ECHR in recent months was the Albanian criminal whose deportation was halted partly because of his young son's aversion to foreign chicken nuggets.)
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