Conservative Party announces it will consider UK ECHR withdrawal

At the UK's Conservative Party conference last week it was announced that human rights law reform will be a major issue in the 2015 general election, and that the Conservative Party is willing to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

Home Secretary Theresa May said in a speech at the Manchester conference that “if leaving the European Convention is what it takes to fix our human rights laws, that is what we should do". May also announced that the right to appeal deportation will be significantly curtailed in a forthcoming Immigration Bill, with the grounds of appeal reduced from seventeen to four. She also said that unless there was a "risk of severe and irreversible harm", non-national criminals would be deported immediately with the option of appealing later.  The Home Secretary also attacked the judiciary's “abuse” of Article 8 of the ECHR, claiming judges sometimes wrongly treated it as an absolute rather than a qualified right. She accused judges of “putting the law on the side of foreign criminals instead of the public”.

Click here to read an article in the UK's Independent newspaper about Theresa May's speech

On a related note, on 29 September the Tory Justice Secretary Chris Grayling criticised the Human Rights Act in an interview with the Spectator, saying “We have to curtail the role of the European Court of Human Rights in the UK, get rid of and replace Labour’s Human Rights Act. We have to make sure that there is a proper balance between rights and responsibilities in law...I want to see our Supreme Court being supreme again. I think people want to see the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom being in the United Kingdom and not in Strasbourg.”

Click here to read an article in the Spectator.

Similarly, in a recent interview, David Cameron said “under a Conservative-only government led by me, there will be the ability to throw out of our country much more rapidly people who threaten us and our way of life”. Click here to read an article in the Guardian. 

 

The UK Human Rights Blog has published a collection of articles arguing against a UK withdrawal from the ECHR, available here

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