The populist right sees the European convention as a soft target in a longer campaign to degrade democratic checks and balances
Most British citizens have little contact with human rights law, which is as it should be in a mature democracy. Widespread anxiety about basic freedoms is a feature of more repressive regimes.
Many people will only have heard of the European convention on human rights (ECHR) in the context of the last Conservative government’s failed attempts to dispatch asylum seekers to Rwanda, or in a handful of incidents where convicted criminals or terrorist suspects have avoided deportation to jurisdictions where they might face inhumane treatment. Such cases are amplified by politicians who are hostile to the whole apparatus of human rights law. The Strasbourg court that adjudicates on breaches of the ECHR is denounced as an enemy of British sovereignty.
Those attacks will continue for as long as asylum, and small-boats traffic on the Channel in particular, are salient political issues – for the foreseeable future, in other words.
Labour’s new “one-in, one-out” scheme for returning seaborne refugees is more robust in legal and humanitarian terms than the failed Tory method. France is a safe country. That won’t stop critics accusing the government of failing to control the border and citing international human rights conventions as the main impediment to the restoration of law and order.
