In my spare time, like many others, I watch some YouTube. As I peruse my captivating collection of rugby compilations and TLDR news, I spot a report of Kemi Badenoch speaking at a half-empty convention centre. Declaring that the Conservative party would leave the European Convention of Human Rights if they won the next election.
Throughout her speech, she emphasised the need to “protect our borders, our veterans, and our citizens”. I was in disbelief at how this bold, original move once again aligns them with the Reform party. Moreover, this declaration piqued my interest. Why is such an organisation that is usually only known to those of us who did politics for A-level, pushed into the forefront of the battle that is our attention spans?
The quick answer to this question is illegal immigration and ease of deportation. However, as is usually the case, the long answer has multiple aspects as well as showing some of the worrying positions it could place ourselves in.
The ECHR defines our fundamental rights, such as the right to life, freedom of expression, prohibition of torture, and the right to a family life. All these rights have been essentially incorporated into our own Human Rights Act passed in 1998. While the HRA does not change the rights afforded to citizens by the electorate, it allows them to bring cases to UK courts if they feel their ECHR rights have been violated. Crucially, it also maintains the Strasbourg appeal: if citizens are unsuccessful in the UK courts, their cases can still be heard at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Strasbourg.
Badenoch and Farage’s main gripe with the ECHR is this Strasbourg appeal. They argue that it hinders the UK and its ability to control its borders. Specifically, they focus on two specific articles: Article 3, which prohibits torture or inhumane treatment and underpins the international law principle of non-refoulement, preventing the deportation of migrants to a country where they face a high risk of persecution or ill-treatment. Article 8, which protects the right to a private and family life, is also cited.
It is often stated that these are abused in the UK, especially the right to a family life. They lord over cases such as the “Cat case”. Where Theresa May at the time the homes secretary made a speech at the 2011 Conservative Party conference claiming that the ECHR “needs to go” and was had become “perverted”. She used the example of an illegal immigrant could not be deported because of his pet cat. She claimed that this excessive use of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights had gone too far to the point that deportation was refused just because they had a cat. But, in fact the actual reasoning that he was not deported was because it was found that he had a proper permanent relationship with his partner who was a British national. Not because he was an introverted man with a house full of cats. They question the need for a second opinion on removal cases, especially one outside the government’s sovereignty, which they find absurd. In their view, this additional layer of bureaucracy only hinders the deportation process and goes against the state’s will.
Therefore, the only logical solution is to leave the ECHR behind, which is just another bureaucratic burden that slows down the removal process. In place of the HRA, which as you will note, threads the ECHR’s articles throughout the bill. They propose replacing the ECHR with a new, pristine, British Bill of Rights. A HRA light if you will with all the boring bits removed or edited. Based off the Tories previous attempts, Article 3’s positive obligations would most likely be reduced, limiting the state’s duty to prevent inhumane treatment. Article 8 would be rewritten to make deportation challenges nearly impossible unless the individual could demonstrate “extreme” or “exceptional” harm.
This new bill would allow for the reinterpretation of rights such as the right to life, freedom of expression, and the right to a family life, all in the name of “protecting our borders.” However, this analogy quickly loses its validity when considering the statistics. The ECtHR has ruled against the UK in deportation/extradition cases 13 times since 1980. This means that the UK’s removal process has been ruled against 0.288 times a year. While it is true that the ECtHR rarely rules against the government, the added layer of bureaucracy it introduces is still a concern that needs to be addressed. However, not every immigrant removed from the UK goes to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). Data from 2016-2021 shows that only 922 foreign national offenders successfully challenged their deportation on human rights grounds in the UK’s first-tier tribunal, representing just 3.5% of total deportations during that period. This number is likely even lower when considering that the upper tribunal can overturn successful challenges.
The question remains: is it worth leaving the ECHR to see a 3.5% improvement in unsuccessful challenges at courts five years? Is there another way to implement such change if necessary? Or are we destined to further restrict civil liberties even more than the Labour government has already?
But deportation statistics are only the beginning of why leaving would be reckless. The ECHR’s entanglement with the state extends far beyond immigration tribunals. Firstly, it would undermine the pivotal Good Friday Agreement. The Good Friday Agreement includes a clause stating that the ECHR should be incorporated into Northern Ireland law, with further references throughout the document. While some right-wing think tanks have suggested renegotiating the Good Friday Agreement, we must question why we would dismantle a key institution explicitly incorporated as a neutral guarantor of rights for both communities in Northern Ireland. Messing with a fragile piece of legislation that has kept relative peace in Northern Ireland for the past thirty years. Even Nigel Farage acknowledges this issue, promising to renegotiate the Good Friday Agreement to remove the ECHR, as if the peace process were merely another Brexit deal to be haggled over.
There is another inconvenient reality: leaving the ECHR would breach the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement, which explicitly requires both parties to respect international human rights treaties. This could push the EU into suspending cooperation in areas like extradition and criminal justice, or even potentially dissolving the entire agreement. While they are unlikely to take such drastic action, the potential consequences if we find ourselves standing on the ruins of the Good Friday Agreement are concerning.
So, is the ECHR a walking corpse or a final safety net? The evidence overwhelmingly suggests the latter. For the sake of improving deportation efficiency in first-tier tribunals by a mere 3.5% over five years, less than one percentage point annually. We would be asked to sacrifice the legal architecture underpinning peace in Northern Ireland, risk our tentative trade relationship with Europe, and join Belarus and Russia as the only European nations outside the Convention.
The ECHR has ruled against UK deportations fewer than once every three years since 1980. This is not a corpse weighing down the system. It is a rarely used safeguard that only intervenes when all domestic remedies have failed, and fundamental rights are genuinely at stake. The real question is not whether we can afford to keep the ECHR. It is whether we can afford to lose it. And for what? A marginal gain in deportation statistics and the hollow satisfaction of “taking back control” from an institution that barely constrains us at all. What they are really objecting to is not bureaucratic inefficiency. It is the principle that some rights should exist beyond the reach of any single government’s political calculations. Strip that away, and we will discover soon enough what we have lost.