Would someone please think of the luvvies? While the rest of the nation is furious about our out-of-control borders and the heinous crimes committed by those who should never have been allowed to stay here in the first place, the Great and Good are furious that the government is taking even modest steps to try to clean up this mess.
Justice Secretary David Lammy is meeting his fellow European ministers in Strasbourg today to discuss reforms to how the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is being interpreted by the continent’s courts. In response to this, Michael Palin, Stephen Fry, Joanna Lumley and assorted other celebrities have made their disquiet known to Downing Street.
‘The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the UN Convention against Torture are at the heart of [Britain’s] legacy,’ reads their open letter, addressed to the PM:
The public debate we so badly need on ‘human rights’ is finally beginning in earnest
They have saved lives, delivered justice and shown the world that Britain leads not by fear, but by principle. Any attempt at undermining their universal protections is an affront to us all and a threat to the security of each and every one of us.
The group Freedom From Torture, which organised the letter, is particularly exercised about any curtailment of the rights enshrined by Article 3 of the ECHR, which prohibits torture and inhuman or degrading treatment. Even a minor tweak, it seems, to how such cases are dealt with would be a boon to despotic regimes:
Will Britain remain a beacon of human rights and the rule of law, or signal to authoritarian states across the globe that these cardinal principles can be abandoned?
Were Lammy et al desperate to bring back waterboarding then perhaps they’d have a point. The truth, of course, is that they are keen to remedy a situation in which the ECHR has morphed into a scumbags’ charter, allowing sex offenders, killers and terrorists to block their deportation.
The cases are mind-boggling. There’s the convicted murderer and rapist who successfully halted his extradition to Brazil. There’s the Isis fanatic who was actually granted British citizenship and blocked from deportation for fear of reprisals in Sudan, despite having travelled back to his homeland on multiple occasions. There’s the paedophile who was allowed to stay because he might face ‘hostility’ in his native Zimbabwe. All of them cited Article 3. All of them are laughing at us.
For all the pious rhetoric, the notion that the ECHR is all that stands between civilisation and barbarism is risible. It does nothing to dent our noble tradition of liberty to insist that we shouldn’t provide safe haven to those intent on molesting or murdering British citizens. Nor do we need the ECHR to uphold our rights, many of which we enjoyed long before the convention was signed in 1950. Frankly, it would be better for both freedom and democracy if we were rid of it. That so-called rights groups and their celebrity mascots are apoplectic at even this limp attempt to limit how the ECHR is interpreted shows that the ‘human rights’ lobby is fuelled by a quasi-religious zeal, not reasoned concern about liberty.
As for this facile idea that even looking askance at the ECHR is an invitation to the autocrats of the world to do as they will, look at Russia. Putin was amassing power and cracking down on dissent long before Russia was booted out of the ECHR in 2022, following the invasion of Ukraine. Power-mad dictators don’t much care what Keir Starmer, let alone Nish Kumar (another signatory of this letter), thinks about them.
Long the preserve of think-tankers and legal eagles, the public debate we so badly need on ‘human rights’ is finally beginning in earnest. Good. The illegal-migration crisis has made clear to ordinary people that these ‘rights’ bear little resemblance to their holy branding and have become a menace to sovereignty, democracy and public safety to boot.
No wonder the luvvies and the human rights lawyers don’t see it. Well-off, well-connected and influential, they are much better insulated from the human cost of their own blinkered virtue-signalling, and so are content to go on defending the indefensible. But the public are not.
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