Andrew Tettenborn is a professor of law at Swansea Law School
The problems with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the bureaucracy behind it aren’t limited to the spanners they push into the wheels of immigration enforcement. They also now appear to be meddling over hard-won sex-based rights. A letter from the Council of Europe’s Human Rights Commissioner, Michael O’Flaherty, is likely to be
Kemi Badenoch’s announcement that the Conservatives are now irrevocably committed to pulling out of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) surprised no-one. It was nevertheless nicely done, and showed that here at least the Tory leader is playing a bad hand rather well. The Tories have now stolen a march on Nigel Farage For
Labour is again running scared on migration. At the party’s conference yesterday, Shabana Mahmood made a clear pitch to middle Britain on the subject. ‘You may not always like what I do,’ she said, addressing Labour’s left, but as regards migration we had to ‘question some of the assumptions and legal constraints that have lasted for a generation and more’. She would, she added, be tightening the rules on indefinite
There was a grain or two of truth in what Donald Trump said last week about migration. A polity is indeed vulnerable to being eaten from the inside by the entry of large numbers of people from very different backgrounds who are not inclined to embrace its culture in preference to their own. But the
The failure to deport any illegal migrants at all on the first designated flight to France yesterday under the agreement the government struck with France in August may be due to bad luck rather than bad management. This is still bad news for the nation; the smuggling gangs, far from being smashed by a complacent
How things change. Five years ago few electors cared about the UK’s membership of the ECHR. Today that same convention, with its baneful effect on our ability to police our borders and keep out undesirables, is fast taking centre stage and becoming Concern Number One with burgeoning numbers of voters: voters who, as the government
Three researchers from Leicester University’s Centre for Hate Studies produced a curious report on Monday about the English countryside. Their theme is that much of rural England is a white racist redoubt, where anyone from an ethnic minority is made to feel unwelcome and psychologically, if not physically, excluded. People of colour, it is said,
It wasn’t surprising that the Home Office chose to back an urgent appeal in the Epping hotel case. Not only were its asylum arrangements in tatters as a result of Mr Justice Eyre’s decision last week: more important, the deadline of 12 September set by the court to stop the use of the Bell Hotel
If Nigel Farage wanted headline treatment for his immigration speech at Oxford Airport this morning, he certainly got it. So far the reaction has been fairly predictable. But politically, there is a good deal more to this affair than meets the eye. The difficulty faced by Farage’s opponents is that, whatever the details, the man’s
The government is badly rattled on immigration. It knows that its perceived inability either to curb rampant asylum abuses or smartly deport those who ought not to be here amounts to an electoral threat. Over this Bank Holiday weekend the Home Office announced yet another scheme to deal with the matter. Currently anyone refused asylum
Yesterday’s injunction granted to Epping Forest council giving the government three weeks to stop using the Bell Hotel for asylum seekers on planning grounds is not quite the slam-dunk that it looks. It is theoretically open to appeal: furthermore, it is only an interim measure pending a full trial later this year. But the affair
Every year the US State Department is required to produce a report on the human rights situation in every country in the world. The report card for the UK came out yesterday. While otherwise fairly anodyne, the US was painfully scathing about our record on free speech. Unsurprisingly, the State Department was unhappy about the Online Safety
The Home Secretary’s extension of the list of countries covered by the ‘deport now, appeal later’ scheme for foreign criminals, announced this morning, doesn’t actually add to the number of undesirables that we can deport. But it could lubricate the process of getting rid of them. Barring a Damascene conversion of the Strasbourg court, something
Today the much-vaunted ‘one in, one out’ agreement over returning small boat migrants to France officially comes into effect. Keir Starmer, as you might expect, has announced with an air of quiet satisfaction that repatriation can now start in earnest and implied that the Channel-sized hole in Britain’s borders is well on the way to
Last week, 15 judges from the International Court of Justice at the Vredespaleis in the Hague, at the request of the UN General Assembly, pronounced solemnly on climate change. Every state, they said, owed duties in international law to take all reasonable measures to suppress climate change; duties, they added, which included exercising control over
Kemi Badenoch this weekend waded into the Islamophobia debate. In a public letter to Keir Starmer she urged the government to suspend the operations of its working group looking for a semi-official definition of Islamophobia. Unfortunately she then rather spoilt the effect by suggesting that the group needed to be supplemented by representatives of grooming
This morning’s paper on leaving the ECHR from Suella Braverman and the Prosperity Institute doesn’t say much that hasn’t been said somewhere before. It reiterates the fairly obvious political case for a UK ECHR exit. It talks about the erosion of sovereignty over immigration, policing and vast swathes of social policy; the baneful ‘living instrument’
To much fanfare, the Church of England this week instituted a plan, funded to the tune of some £150 million and overseen by a well-respected City law firm, to compensate the victims of abuse carried out by church officials. So far, so good. But when we are talking big money like this, eligibility needs to
Among the many peripheral hangers-on at the UN, are members of a curious class of functionary known as special rapporteurs. Numbering about 80, these are in theory independent experts appointed by the Human Rights Council to oversee either particular countries or particular issues. In practice, however, they tend to be drawn from the ranks of
A major plank in the Labour Party’s electoral platform last year was its policy of scrupulous obedience to international law. Attorney-General Lord Hermer has repeatedly pushed this view, swearing undying loyalty to everything from pyjama injunctions coming out of Strasbourg to arrest warrants from the Hague. Unfortunately this exercise in legal piety is now coming
