Controversy around the European Convention on Human Rights is not wholly new.
I well recall the issue of prisoners’ votes in 2011, shortly after I began as an MP. Then, in a free vote on a cross-party motion, Parliament voted overwhelmingly to retain the blanket ban on prisoners voting, despite the European Court’s ruling. The matter remained unresolved for years, until some administrative changes that meant the UK government could say it didn’t have a “blanket” ban, but without actually giving the vote to people in custody.
Then, as now, the big question is whether this was really a matter that needed reference at all to an international treaty, or was properly a matter simply for our own elected Parliament and our own judicial system.
Most recently, the Home Secretary has been infuriated by the Council of Europe's Human Rights Commissioner’s warnings to the UK on the issues of trans rights and the proscription of Palestine Action.
But more than anything else it is the issue of asylum and illegal immigration that has put the ECHR into debate. People who arrive here illegally, and are denied the right to stay, are still able to use the Convention to resist deportation, often through prolonged legal challenges and sometimes at great expense to the UK taxpayer.
Drafted in the aftermath of the Second World War, the founding aim of the ECHR was noble: to enshrine basic liberties, protect citizens from despotism, and prevent tyranny from re-emerging in Europe.
So the ECHR was created to buttress liberal democracy. But many now see the opposite.
We elect a government and a Parliament to make laws, and we have an independent judiciary to interpret legislation and uphold the Rule of Law.
If the clear will of the elected Parliament is hamstrung beyond that, it undermines the fundamental principle of parliamentary sovereignty, and public confidence in it.
Britain's commitment to fundamental rights did not begin with the ECHR. Our protections stem from a much longer common law tradition. Other liberal democracies in this tradition have developed strong rights protections without signing such a Convention.
The Leader of the Opposition recently asked Lord Wolfson to lead a commission into the UK’s relationship with the ECHR. His report offers a sober and thorough analysis of the legal and constitutional complexities that would be involved. No one is pretending that withdrawal would be simple or immediate.
There would be serious implications, not least for the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, which must be addressed carefully and responsibly.
However, for many, myself included, it is becoming increasingly clear that the current situation is unsustainable.
If meaningful and effective reform of the ECHR cannot be secured within a short timeframe, withdrawal may no longer be a political taboo, but widely seen as a pragmatic step in the interests of our democracy, and people’s faith in it.
Image above is of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasburg (courtesy of Pixabay).
