The European Court of Human Rights intervened to stop the deportation flight of asylum seekers to Rwanda. The UK is a member of the Council of Europe and a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights.
We asked your views on: How should the government react to the ruling by the ECHR?
Freedom campaigner and former Brexit Party candidate Peter Sonnex.
“the ECtHR certainly had a role post WWII as human rights were consolidated and as nation states matured their domestic, accountable, justice systems. More recently, ECtHR judgements have been increasingly ignored, and therefore made irrelevant without enforcement”
I think we should leave the orbit of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) on the basis we have a mature domestic justice system (albeit compromised for now by the relatively recent Supreme Court construct which can be fixed…). However, leaving is not straight forward as the ECtHR is tied to our membership of the 47 nation Council of Europe (what’s that all about?), and remains a condition of the UK/EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement.
I worked in Whitehall for 5 years servicing UK commitments to a number of international treaties and conventions. Some were bilateral, multilateral or bound to international and supranational organisations for their administration. Clear to me was that the UK participated in, and contributed financially, to pretty much the lot!
Other countries, perhaps more discerning in their national interests, attended fewer. Some smaller state delegations were funded by non-government organisations where a vote was effectively bought to promote a particular outcome…
Special international courts may have a place where, with the agreement of affected states, domestic competence and capacity does not exist – often post conflict. The court is convened and financed for as long as it is necessary. Recent examples are for Cambodia, Former Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone and the Rwanda Genocide.
The Council of Europe with the ECtHR certainly had a role post WWII as human rights were consolidated and as nation states matured their domestic, accountable, justice systems. More recently, ECtHR judgements have been increasingly ignored, and therefore made irrelevant without enforcement, by Russia and Ukraine (and Italy!?) in particular.
Russia has been suspended from the Council of Europe following its further interventions in Ukraine and, oddly, is therefore no longer even required to be bound. Any future special international tribunal for Ukraine could only be constituted with the agreement of Russia…
Bottom Line: the UK should leave the ECtHR on the basis it is expensive, not accountable, and is no longer relevant, credible or effective in the promotion and defence of human rights. As with many international and supranational organisations I saw in operation, they are toothless, self-licking lollipops…
Councillor Sandy Wallace of the Scottish Libertarian Party.
“I believe to an almost religious extent in free-market economics, and accordingly, I am an enthusiast for mass economic migration…. But a government must be in control of its borders, or it is not a sovereign government”
Firstly, let’s bear in mind that the ECHR ruling was not that the deportations should be abandoned, which is beyond their legal competence (as well BTW their intellectual competence). The ECHR ruled that the deportations should not go ahead until all (British) legal avenues had been exhausted. That’s actually fair enough. It’s our own fault that we have an idiotic level of no-risk judicial oversight where activist lawyers operating pro-Bono or on left-wing crowdfunding can cause delays without risking the award of costs again them.
Short term the government should react by pressing ahead, legally, with this policy. Medium-term they should react by closing loopholes that permit this level of legal politically motivated time-wasting challenge. Long term, as with all international obligations, from the UN downwards, the UK government should consider whether or not it wishes to remove itself from them. It is a nuclear option that should not be taken lightly, but neither should it be regarded as beyond consideration.
I believe to an almost religious extent in free-market economics, and accordingly, I am an enthusiast for mass economic migration. I place no upper limit on how many migrants the UK should accept. I would be comfortable with a net positive of half a million per year if they were carefully vetted, and yes, I would joyously lock block the Green belt to enable it. But a government must be in control of its borders, or it is not a sovereign government. I am content to see illegal immigrants deported with a life ban from entering the UK.
Opposition to illegal immigration does not require opposition to economic migrancy.
Nick Mane, local Brexiteer.
“The truth is, instead of helping poorer countries with aid and investment the EU decided to exploit it’s cheap youth and talent with an open door invitation”
The recent ruling from the European Court of Human Rights highlights some of many gargantuan evils which European Institutions, including the EU are continuing to rush headfirst to adopt.
The truth is, instead of helping poorer countries with aid and investment the EU decided to exploit it’s cheap youth and talent with an open door invitation. Mass immigration was the worst thing they could have done, just ask the EU’s abandoned, ageing rural populations and the bereaved families. Immigration was not the answer but it suited Merkel’s aspirations to import cheap labour at the cost of all Europeans to grow productivity.
Thousands drowned, countless girls raped and forced into the sex industry and thousands left to die in the Sahara dessert by crooked people traffickers. All this for immigrants who can afford people trafficker fees of £20,000, enough to build them a home in their own country.
This was sold as an humanitarian act but when did Angela Merkel ever care about all the Greek pensioners who had their pensions stripped and public servants who were thrown out of their jobs or the massive EU youth unemployment caused across Europe in the aftermath of the 2007 crisis? The EU protected the Euro by not allowing their member states to spend on job creation, simple. They certainly never cared for high wages for their own workers, so it opened the floodgates to mass immigration, not because Merkel’s a loving, caring, matriarch but with the sole intention to import cheap labour.
All this because of Centralised, Unaccountable Power. Nobody cares in distant, lavish offices for what happens to people in Watford or Kilmarnock! Decentralising power, taking influence and resolutions closer to the electorate has been the rallying cry across the whole of the UK for decades simply because the best people to identify and resolve issues are those closest to the issues.
Brexit was supposed to free us from EU perils, to return our supremacy of Laws and borders but Boris, being the consummate politician, tried to keep everyone happy by selling our Laws and borders out to the EU and splitting up the UK. Ultimately, we were all sold out.
So here we are, the EU caused this massive problem and as we no longer control our borders and laws, the EU is flexing it’s muscles to say they still rule us. Our only rational way forwards might include any or all of the following :-
- Ditch the European Human Rights Act and replace it with our own Bill.
- Ditch European Law supremacy
- Ditch Boris
- Invest in the UK in sectors such as manufacturing, technologies, infrastructure.
- Defund any legal service which chooses to cynically exploit our legal funding system
- Create our own basic constitution to protect us from abuse of power from our own politicians. We had no choice over lockdowns, no choice in handing over sovereignty to a foreign power, no protection over police investigating the public for the ‘wrong type of thinking’.
- Make cancel culture a criminal act, we need our history, our comedians, our freedom of speech.
- Make the BBC impartial or defund it.
It would also be really nice if the UK has an opposition party which is capable of challenging for power, a party which is practical, capable of independent, rational, coherent thinking to fill the vacuum which is sucking us into a void of mad shouty people intent on dominating debates.
The Loony left is not only back with a vengeance, it’s now mainstream.
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