The need to think seriously about our membership of the ECHR gets more glaring daily. Some time ago, a Gazan woman was given refuge here with her three children. She then asked the Home Office to bring in 18 more people from Gaza: her parents, three siblings, two of their spouses and their children. They do not have any other connection with this country, and many speak no English whatsoever. Met with an understandable refusal, the relatives sued. This week they won in an immigration appeal tribunal. Why? The right to family life, as enshrined in Article 8 of the ECHR.
You might have thought that signing a convention agreeing to respect family life didn’t involve committing to upend our immigration laws in favour of vast Middle Eastern extended families
You might have thought that signing a convention agreeing to respect family life didn’t involve committing to upend our immigration laws in favour of vast Middle Eastern extended families. The governments that set up the ECHR in 1950 almost certainly thought the same. But hey-ho, this is human rights land, where the rules of common sense apply if at all only in a very vague way.
In a microcosm this case illustrates rather neatly what is wrong with the ECHR and its emanation here, the Human Rights Act 1998.
