Rishi Sunak has come closer than ever to advocating a departure from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Last week he dismissed as “foreign” the institution that the United Kingdom pioneered and, under Winston Churchill’s leadership, persuaded the rest of Europe to join. Now, after 70 years, the prime minister says he will walk away from it if it does not give him the go-ahead to deport migrants to Rwanda.
This intervention follows another astonishing Sunak claim of a few weeks ago: but for the intervention of the Rwandan government, he admitted, he would have walked away from the ECHR already.
The Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law has compellingly explained that “the central purpose of the [Rwanda] bill, to conclusively deem Rwanda to be a safe country, is contrary to the rule of law” and that it “would amount to a legislative usurpation of the judicial function, contrary to the UK’s constitutional understanding of the separation of powers, which requires the legislature to respect the essence of the judicial function”.
The act will disapply important sections of the ECHR and the Human Rights Act. Already, ministers have taken the power to ignore interim measures of the European Court of Human Rights but the new “notwithstanding clauses” in the current bill are of a completely different order of magnitude.
They assert that the provisions of the bill override “any interpretation of international law” as well as of domestic law by a court or tribunal.
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The prime minister has added a clause making clear that it is now up to the home secretary to decide whether to abide by any interim injunction of the European Court, such as temporarily halting flights to Rwanda, and he wants to prevent any individual from making a successful claim directly to Europe.
When Sunak arrived in No 10, he had an opportunity to reaffirm core British values after the years of Johnson and Truss playing fast and loose with them. Yet, while stopping short of formally leaving the ECHR — the issue he has with the ultra-right of the party — he appears to have renounced its core elements.
Under this Conservative administration, the whole system of international law — not just the ECHR, but also the Refugee Convention and general human rights and humanitarian law — is being systemically undermined.
The result? Russia will exploit the British retreat to ridicule the legitimacy of international human rights law and our voice in the world will increasingly go unheard.
Gordon Brown is a former prime minister of the United Kingdom
