"Should the UK leave or remain, faced with a need to better protect its borders and citizens from crime?" asks Kevin Foster
Kevin Foster was the Conservative MP for Torbay from 2015 to 2024
If you ask an American what guarantees their freedom, they will talk about the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights.
The United States Military pledge to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic”, with school days starting with the pledge of allegiance to the flag and the republic (constitution) it represents.
The US Constitution and the freedoms it guarantees are engrained into American life, amending it is deliberately difficult, so is rarely done.
An Amendment is only possible when there is overwhelming support for change.
Now imagine trying to argue Americans could only genuinely have their rights protected if they signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
Then try arguing Canadian, Australian or New Zealand citizens are at risk of losing fundamental rights if they don’t do so either.
These suggestions are ridiculous not just due to geographical location, but because they are modern democracies with strong domestic protections of their citizens' rights.
The ECHR is not needed to protect their citizens' rights, so is it needed for UK Citizens? Should the UK leave or remain, faced with a need to better protect its borders and citizens from crime?
The ECHR was written amidst the aftermath of the appalling abuses of human rights by Nazi Germany and its allies, with Stalinist totalitarianism spreading across Central and Eastern Europe.
The values it enshrines are ones which few would argue with. Yet it is not the Europe of the 1940s or the aims of its founders we should look at, but the structure built around it over the last seven decades and the impact of convention membership today.
Any debate about leaving or derogating from the ECHR instantly provokes howls of protest at dinner parties from those unlikely to face living next to where a dangerous criminal who could not be deported ends up staying.
They will claim it's “a slippery slope to dictatorship” or proof “our rights will all be gone” if the UK Parliament asserts our sovereignty to protect our nation.
Yet membership of the ECHR does not stop a country from sliding towards dictatorship, as communist repression across Eastern Europe in the past and Putin’s Russia currently shows.
When Russia exited the convention on 16 September 2022, after the invasion of Ukraine, 2129 judgments and decisions of the European Court on Human Rights had yet to be fully implemented by Russia. The Kremlin’s bin presumably being the most common place for filing them.
The ECHR relies on its members wanting to be democracies, it cannot stop them ceasing to be one.
LATEST OPINION FROM MEMBERSHIP:
Leaving the ECHR is not the only point we should consider in taking firm control of our borders. We must ensure other routes of lawfare are not opened and have an answer to the question which lies at the heart of the people smugglers’ business model: “What do you do with someone when their own country won’t take them back and neither will the country they left to come here?”.
The Rwanda Plan answered this question, whilst demands simply to take small boats back to France or simply hoping other countries will eventually accept returns of their citizens won’t.
If the UK must choose between leaving or remaining in the ECHR to end the legal merry-go-round and give clarity to our courts about our determination to protect our borders, then leave we must.
Our Canadian, Australian, Kiwi and American Allies all show the best protection for your rights is not a foreign court and its judges, but effective constitutional guarantees.
