A senior Labour grandee has become the first on the left to suggest Britain should begin questioning its relationship with the European Court of Human Rights. Tony Blair’s Home Secretary Jack Straw has made a surprising intervention to urge Sir Keir Starmer to start distancing the UK from the foreign court, after years of criticism from the right.
In a letter to The Times, Mr Straw argues that given the success of the Human Rights Act, which was passed by Tony Blair’s government and incorporated ECHR law into British statute, there is little reason to still be a member of the foreign body. He wrote: “It is the success of the HRA that provides the Prime Minister with a way through the dilemma… about the difficulties to effective immigration control that the ECHR presents. These have been thrown up not by the convention itself but by expansive, and sometimes inconsistent or incoherent, interpretations of its articles by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
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Jack Straw has said Britain can do with the ECHR (Image: Getty)
“The fundamental problem with the Strasbourg court is that there is no democratic override to its decisions, as there is for any decision of a British court, and many of its judgments are of a lower quality than those of our senior courts.
“Given the undoubted success of the HRA, the question that must now arise is: what utility is there in the UK being bound any more into the Strasbourg court? Not much, is my answer. The convention articles are safe enough within our own HRA.”
Sir Keir Starmer won the election after promising to smash international people-smuggling gangs and stop small boat crossings into Britain.
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However, a number of recent cases involving asylum seekers have shone a brighter light on the inability of Britain to deport foreign criminals thanks to the ECHR.
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The Labour grandee is one of the first figures on the left to question Britain's membership (Image: Getty)
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These include an Albanian criminal who could not be deported due to his son’s dislike of foreign chicken nuggets, and a Pakistani paedophile jailed who claimed deportation would be “unduly harsh” on his own children.
Reform UK is promising to withdraw Britain from the convention as a priority should they win the next election, however the Tories remain split on the issue.
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While senior Conservatives such as Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman are passionately supportive of pulling out, Kemi Badenoch has refused to endorse the policy.
However the party has tabled amendments to the Government’s Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill, which would disapply the Human Rights Act - and therefore the ECHR - on all immigration matters.
This would mean judges would no longer be able to apply foreign treaties when deciding on cases of deportation.