Council of Europe and the European Convention on Human Rights
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David Mundell (in the Chair)
Before we start proceedings, I want to say two things. First, this debate is oversubscribed, so not everyone will get to speak. I hope to call 10 Back- Bench Members to contribute for three minutes each. If Members take interventions, they will not get extra time because this is an hour-long debate. Secondly, we expect Divisions in the House shortly. The procedure will be to suspend the debate for 15 minutes for the first Division and approximately 10 minutes for each subsequent Division.
Cat Eccles (Stourbridge) (Lab) [R]
I beg to move,
That this House has considered UK participation in the Council of Europe and the European Convention on Human Rights.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Mundell. Yesterday marked 75 years since the United Kingdom, a founding member of the Council of Europe, was one of 12 states to ratify the European convention on human rights. At the time, the world was emerging from the ruin of war and the defeat of Nazism, but new threats were emerging: a belligerent and confident Russia under the rule of a bloody dictator with his eyes on the west; proxy wars in south-east Asia; and mass population movements in the aftermath of war. The idea was to prevent these atrocities and abuses from ever being repeated.
Is the convention really so out of date and out of time, as its critics argue? Over the following 75 years, the Council of Europe and the ECHR have grown to encompass 46 member states in Europe, with only Belarus and Russia excluded. The Council of Europe has succeeded in bringing together a universal understanding of human rights, namely that human rights belong to everyone by virtue of their inherent dignity and worth as human beings. As we head into Remembrance Week, it is important to note that the convention is a cornerstone of why we say, “Lest we forget.”
I am proud to be a delegate to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, or PACE. The UK is represented by a formidable team of cross-party MPs and peers. I was inspired to run for the Council of Europe by former Stourbridge Labour party member, and former MP for Bromsgrove and later Birmingham Hodge Hill, the right hon. Terry Davis. In 2004, he was elected secretary-general of the Council of Europe and served until 2009.
The UK delegation in Strasbourg is incredibly active, and several Members have acted as rapporteurs, presenting reports and recommendations for adoption by all member states. In the most recent plenary session, in September, Lord German led an urgent debate calling for an end to the devastating humanitarian catastrophe and the killing of journalists in Gaza. Lord Keen of Elie presented a draft convention to establish an international claims commission for Ukraine, and to create a compensation mechanism, with a damage register and claims body, to fund the reconstruction following Russian aggression.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I do not often have a different opinion from the hon. Lady, but I do here. Our party, the Democratic Unionist party, is very much opposed to the European convention on human rights, and our opposition is primarily based on arguments about national sovereignty and the need for the UK to have full control of its borders and immigration policies, which is central to us. I may be at odds with the hon. Lady, but it is important that we recognise that people have different opinions on this issue.
Cat Eccles
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his contribution.
Earlier this year, my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton and Winchmore Hill (Kate Osamor) reported on Europe’s demographic ageing and the decline in youth and working-age populations, highlighting the impact on the elderly, public services, labour markets and pensions. PACE adopted a resolution urging greater support for older people and called on member states to develop effective policies to ensure their wellbeing and quality of life. It also recommended improving policies to promote migrant integration and social cohesion.
Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith and Chiswick) (Lab)
We are also celebrating another event: the 25th anniversary of the coming into force of the Human Rights Act 1998. Like the European convention, it is about the rights of the individual against the state, and it gives individuals in this country the right to enforce those rights. Those are both things that we should be celebrating.
Cat Eccles
My hon. Friend the Member for Jarrow and Gateshead East (Kate Osborne) is one of the longest-serving delegates. She sits on the Committee on Equality and Non-Discrimination, fighting for gender equality, combating violence against women and girls and defending the rights of the LGBTQ+ community. She is a rapporteur for the committee and has overseen a report on the ban of so-called conversion practices, which will hopefully be passed at the next plenary in January. That report will provide model legislation for all 46 member states to pass and end that awful practice. Let us hope that this House is ready to enact those recommendations, as promised in our manifesto and the King’s Speech. As a member of the Committee on Culture, Science, Education and Media, I have worked with colleagues on youth democracy, artificial intelligence, ethics in sport and media freedom.
The Council of Europe develops recommendations on issues affecting all member states, including the UK. We may be an island, but sharing best practice and developing common conventions strengthens rights, freedoms and democratic values across the continent. The Council of Europe continues to lead globally, abolishing the death penalty in Europe, supporting democratic transitions and exposing human rights abuses. It expelled Russia from the Council, declaring it a terrorist state, and Belarus for its support for Russian aggression. This summer, I witnessed history being made in Strasbourg as President Zelensky signed a bilateral agreement with the Council of Europe to bring a trial against Russia for crimes of aggression against Ukraine.
But what has the ECHR ever done for us? Well, it has ensured that the Good Friday agreement has lasted this long. The incorporation of the ECHR into Northern Irish law means that the people of Northern Ireland have an independent arbiter to trust in disputes over fault during the troubles, and that is no small thing. It is vital to peace, societal rebuilding and the end of sectarianism. Maintained rights can create faith in people and shine light out of darkness.
Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South and Walkden) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. The European convention gives us the right not to be tortured, not to be deprived of liberty without due process of law, to have a fair trial, to have privacy and to have freedom of expression. I ask all the people who are against it: what rights do they think the British people should not have?
Cat Eccles
My hon. Friend is absolutely right; it is difficult to see which of those rights needs to be updated, replaced or taken away.
Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)
The UK was instrumental in the creation of the ECHR. The Council of Europe now says that it is ready for reform. Is it not time for us to shape the future of human rights legislation in Europe, and absolutely the wrong time to abandon our place at the table?
Cat Eccles
The hon. Lady is absolutely right—we need to be around that table. We were there at the start, and we need to see it through and ensure that we maintain our place in that conversation.
Why not replace the ECHR with a British Bill of Rights? Well, we have one—the Human Rights Act 1998. The ECHR was drafted by British lawyers based on Britain’s common law and Magna Carta. In fact, during the negotiations on the Good Friday agreement, a British Bill of Rights was drafted and later rejected by right-wing politicians, to prevent a difference of rights across the Irish border.
It is because of the ECHR that a ban on gay people serving in the armed forces could be challenged and overturned by a young barrister whom we now know as the Prime Minister. A memorial was unveiled this week to commemorate those who served during that historical ban from 1967 to 2000. It is because of the ECHR that we got justice for the Hillsborough victims and were able to present the Hillsborough law, the Public Authority (Accountability) Bill, in Parliament this week.
The ECHR allows us to hold Governments to account and seek justice when those in power try to cover things up or overstep their remit. We must ask ourselves, “Why would anyone want to remove a mechanism to prevent those in power from abusing that power?” How dark our future could be if that were allowed to happen.
Linsey Farnsworth (Amber Valley) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is making a very powerful speech. I was looking at some of the examples of how this mechanism protects people in the UK. For example, the injunction served on The Sunday Times preventing it from reporting on thalidomide was overturned by the European convention on human rights. Such cases show how important it is for checks and balances on our own Government. God only knows what the future will look like if we come out of the ECHR.
Cat Eccles
My hon. Friend has made a really important point. The convention covers so many parts of our life and we must maintain it.
Currently, our politics is consumed by the issue of small boats. Despite representing less than 2% of all immigration into the UK, the boats are suddenly the reason why we must abandon the convention and place our collective human rights at the mercy of Government. In many ways, the attempted attacks on our freedoms under the guise of liberation remind me of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”. They say that truth is stranger than fiction, but I do not want to find myself looking from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again, and finding that I cannot tell which is which.
Of course, even the conflation of small boat arrivals with the ECHR is a lie. Mr Mundell, did you know that the ECHR has nothing written down relating to immigration or asylum? There is no right to asylum in the ECHR. Did you also know that, since the Human Rights Act 1998, the European Court’s rulings against the UK have fallen dramatically? It used to average 17 a year; now it is fewer than four. Indeed, it ruled against the UK only once in 2024—when, in a very nice piece of irony, the ECHR protected the rights of the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday to freedom of expression. Even the convention’s harshest critics come running to it for protection when they are under threat from big government.
The University of Oxford recently published a Bonavero report titled “The European Convention on Human Rights and Immigration Control in the UK: Informing the Public Debate”, which centres on misinformation, over-reporting and outright lies in the press that poison the debate around the ECHR. I highly recommend it to all Members who are wavering on whether the UK should stay in the convention or leave it because of immigration.
There are two articles of the ECHR that have been tied to immigration. Article 3 is applied so that we do not send individuals back to torture or death—I would like to believe that we can all agree on that. Article 8, the right to family life, is projected by the ECHR’s critics as the real villain of the piece. They argue that it stops deportations of foreign criminals, sex offenders and individuals who arrived in the UK via small boats. There really is a lot of rubbish written in the papers and online relating to article 8, using examples of how the ECHR is being used to stop deportations and erode national security and identity.
The most notorious example was in February this year, when an Albanian criminal was apparently granted appeal to deportation because his son would not eat foreign chicken nuggets. The ruling was made because the criminal’s younger child had sensory issues, food sensitivities and emotional difficulties, but the upper tribunal rejected the appeal as not strong enough to be considered unduly harsh, and the case is still under review. For the record, article 8 is primarily used for reunification of British citizens with family members who are foreign nationals.
Let us step away from that story and look at some statistics. From 2015 to 2021, the Home Office removed 31,400 foreign national offenders from the UK, and in that period 1,000 foreign criminals managed to halt deportation on ECHR grounds, roughly 3% of the overall figure. Less than 1% of those cases were ultimately successful, so the ECHR is hardly the immovable object blocking the UK’s will in removing offenders from its shores.
Furthermore, the Court has ruled only three times that the UK’s immigration rules have violated the ECHR in the past 45 years, but political and media pressure appears to be bearing down on our relationship with the ECHR. There have been noises about tweaking the convention and about opening discussions, the thought of which fills me with dread.
Why concede the argument that the ECHR is to blame for our impotence, when that squarely does not match the reality? Why put the EHCR directly in the limelight of the political will of the day? Why cost businesses an estimated £1.6 billion at a time when they are already struggling? Why abandon the soft power that our place in the convention and institution affords us?
If I may say so, this reminds me of David Cameron’s renegotiation with the EU prior to the referendum. He put Britain’s relationship with the EU at the forefront of the agenda and worked tirelessly to get a better deal for Britain, believing that if he could show that Britain can renegotiate, the crocodiles in his party and on the fringes would let up—but in the end he lost it all. I make a plea to the Minister and to the Government: “Let’s draw a line in the sand. Stand up and fight for the convention and our place in it. Do not concede. Do not think that you can find a middle course that will satisfy all parties and stem the anti-politics sentiment that is so prevalent in the UK today. Let’s be bold and argue for the UK’s role in the Council of Europe and the ECHR.”
Mr Paul Kohler (Wimbledon) (LD)
It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mr Mundell. I congratulate the hon. Member for Stourbridge (Cat Eccles) on securing this debate.
I am pleased to speak about the ECHR and the UK’s membership of the Council of Europe. Across the political spectrum, parties are flirting with withdrawal. It feels like Brexit déjà vu, with the same hollow promises of taking back control, the same disregard for facts and the same blindness to consequence. The siren voices who said leaving the EU would be easy are now saying the same about leaving the ECHR, and thereby the Council of Europe.
Lord Wolfson’s recent report to the Conservative leader, for example, offers a threadbare fig leaf, based on an extremely narrow reading of the law that downplays the legal obstacles and, by his own admission, ignores the political ones. As Lord Wolfson knows, withdrawal would not be a technical exercise in legislative drafting, but a rupture in the constitutional fabric that binds these islands together. Reform, not rupture, should be our guiding principle; the convention can be updated to serve a modern democracy without sacrificing its founding principles.
Two practical measures would command broad support. First, the UK could lead efforts to clarify the scope of key provisions, particularly article 8, so that domestic courts can apply them with greater predictability and closer regard to parliamentary intent. Secondly, rather than withdrawing, we could work with other Council of Europe members to update the living instrument doctrine, ensuring that the Court’s interpretation better reflects democratic consent and contemporary realities. Those would be acts not of retreat, but leadership, strengthening Britain’s international role as a principled champion of the rule of law.
Despite what Lord Wolfson says, there are serious legal barriers to withdrawal. As the Liberal Democrat spokesperson on Northern Ireland, I must warn of the profound risks to peace at home. The ECHR is embedded in the Scotland Act 1998, the Wales Act 2017, the Northern Ireland Act 1998 and the Good Friday agreement. Removing it would require overhauling devolution and entail legislative chaos. Turning to Northern Ireland, withdrawal would breach our international commitments, destabilise all communities, betray those who built peace and force renegotiation of the UK-EU trade and co-operation agreement.
I say this to the Tories, Reform and the Labour leadership: flirting with populism for political convenience endangers both our unity at home and our reputation abroad. As Brexit has shown, dismantling international commitments might sound easy and liberating—but, as we know to our cost, it is neither. It is a hugely damaging, expensive diversion that will only make our problems worse.
Tony Vaughan (Folkestone and Hythe) (Lab)
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge (Cat Eccles) for securing this important debate. The ECHR has delivered extraordinary victories for British people. When Jeanette Smith and Graeme Grady were discharged from the armed forces simply for being gay, the English courts rejected their challenge, but the Strasbourg Court unanimously upheld their rights. Today the armed forces welcome all people regardless of sexual orientation.
The ECHR has protected children wrongfully taken into care; workers have won the right to express their faith and mental health patients have gained proper legal safeguards. Those are not abstract legal victories—they are real, and have changed people’s lives for the better. Yet many voices, including that of the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), who is no longer in his place, paint the ECHR as our enemy and as a barrier to border control. They could not be more wrong. The truth is that we need the ECHR to manage our borders.
A common rights framework means that our European partners will work with us to tackle organised people smuggling and to protect our national security. We had the UK-France deal this summer, Bulgaria is intercepting smuggling boats at the EU border, and Germany is reforming its criminal laws to confront these shared challenges. Even Rwanda said that it will not work with us unless we observe human rights. Let us not forget that it was the failed Brexit project that destroyed the Dublin regulation, leaving us without any EU returns agreement. We then saw the number of dangerous crossings soar.
The ECHR did not stop the UK from removing 34,000 people with no right to be here in 2024, which was the highest number since 2017. Under 1% of foreign national offenders successfully appeal deportation on human rights grounds; since 1980, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge said, the Strasbourg Court found against the UK on deportation cases just a handful of times, only four of which concerned family life. The Reform and Tory policy of ECHR withdrawal is simply Brexit 2.0 and isolationism. It will not secure our borders. It will not solve anything.
James Naish (Rushcliffe) (Lab)
My hon. and learned Friend has listed a number of very good examples of what has been achieved as a result of the ECHR. Does he agree that we need to work together to highlight its benefits, as opposed to seeking to tear it down or tear it apart?
David Mundell (in the Chair)
Can the hon. and learned Gentleman conclude in 30 seconds, because there is no additional time for interventions?
Tony Vaughan
I will conclude by saying that, on this 75th anniversary, 300 organisations—from Liberty to Mind, Shelter to Amnesty—rightly defend the convention. It is up to this Government to demonstrate to the public that we can have both border control and compassion. Let us celebrate 75 years of freedom, and 75 more.
Rupert Lowe (Great Yarmouth) (Ind)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. What does the ECHR actually mean for British people? Let us go through a few examples. A convicted Sri Lankan sex offender was allowed to stay in Britain because he is gay and would be at risk of persecution if he was returned to his home country. I do not care. A Jamaican drug dealer was jailed twice but allowed to stay in Britain after claiming that his removal would breach his right to family life. I do not care.
David Mundell (in the Chair)
The hon. Gentleman is not taking that intervention, so let us continue.
Rupert Lowe
No. A Zimbabwean was jailed for killing a man in a car crash but allowed to stay in Britain after it was discovered that he had an illicit love child. I do not care. A convicted Indian paedophile was allowed to stay in Britain by claiming that the move would harm his children. I do not care. An Albanian criminal was allowed to stay in Britain partly because his son will not eat foreign chicken nuggets. I definitely do not care. We hear so much about the human rights of foreign paedophiles, sex pests and murderers—
Several hon. Members rose—
David Mundell (in the Chair)
The hon. Gentleman is not giving way. Members may disagree with what he is saying, but we will conduct this debate in an orderly way.
Rupert Lowe
What about the human rights of the British people? They have the right not to be raped, stabbed and killed by foreigners who should never have been in our country to begin with. Please spare me the continued moral outrage.
Yasmin Qureshi
On a point of order, Mr Mundell. The hon. Gentleman just mentioned that—
David Mundell (in the Chair)
I already know that is not a point of order in relation to the content of the hon. Gentleman’s speech.
Rupert Lowe
Please spare me the continued moral outrage. I am bored of it. The British people are bored of it. It is not cruel to deport criminals, and it is not inhumane to defend our own citizens. What is cruel and inhumane is allowing foreign killers and sex offenders to walk among us in the name of the human rights they should have forfeited the moment they committed their crimes. Hon. Members can sit here and persuade themselves otherwise, but one simple fact remains: the British people want those people gone—not some of them, not most of them, but all of them. What happens on their return to their own country is quite simply not our problem.
The solution is to take three straightforward steps. Step one: we should leave the ECHR and remove all other legal obstacles to mass deportation—Restore Britain’s new 100-plus page policy document proves it can be done. Step two—
Perran Moon (Camborne and Redruth) (Lab)
It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mr Mundell. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge (Cat Eccles) on securing this important debate. As a fellow delegate to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, I can personally attest to her dedication in this area.
I want to bring a Cornish perspective to the importance of the Council of Europe and the European convention on human rights—one that shines a light on our membership. First, the framework convention for the protection of national minorities, although less well known than the European convention on human rights, is one of the most comprehensive treaties to protect the rights of national minorities, including the Cornish people. Leaving the European convention on human rights would call into question our membership of the Council of Europe. Those who wish for that departure either have not considered the implications for Cornish national minority status, or they have considered those implications and do not care about the Cornish.
There is also the European charter for regional or minority languages, which protects, supports and encourages minority languages such as Cornish, or Kernewek. These are important commitments to which the UK is a signatory. They are too often considered secondary, but they bring tangible social and cultural benefits to the people of Cornwall. If we lived in a world governed by the parties that wish to leave the European convention on human rights, we would risk leaving the Council of Europe altogether. Any move to withdraw from the European convention on human rights would likely cause us to leave the Council of Europe, putting at risk the protections and benefits on which Cornish people rely under those other conventions.
In his ten-minute rule Bill last week, the hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage), who is regrettably not here today—I notified him that I was going to raise this—described leaving the European convention on human rights as “unfinished business.” Having played a key role in the economic damage caused by Brexit, it seems that he is back for more, determined to sever another vital limb of our international partnerships as he attempts to steer the country on to the rocks of isolationism.
Some voices on the right argue that basic human rights hold us back. I believe they do quite the opposite. The hon. Member for Clacton will not talk about the other guarantees under the European convention on human rights: the right to life, the right to be free from torture and the right to liberty. As has been mentioned, bodies such as the Bonavero Institute at Oxford University have rightly said that some of the commentary on the European convention on human rights is misleading, often based on incendiary anecdotes involving chicken nuggets and pet cats. In reality, court rulings are far more complicated.
Pete Wishart (Perth and Kinross-shire) (SNP)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Mundell. I congratulate the hon. Member for Stourbridge (Cat Eccles) on securing this debate.
When politicians such as the hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage), Conservative Members or, indeed, the hon. Member for Great Yarmouth (Rupert Lowe) want us to leave the European convention on human rights, it tells us something quite reassuring, which is that the ECHR is doing precisely the job it was designed to do to protect all of us from the whims of tinpot populists like the hon. Member for Clacton. When parties such as Reform, and indeed the Conservative party, rail against the ECHR, it tells us everything we need to know about why it is so desperately required.
Those politicians want to remove our basic rights in order to leave the disadvantaged unprotected and their authoritarian tendencies unchallenged. It is in situations like this, when our human rights are most under attack, that we must redouble our efforts to ensure that they are preserved. Let us remind ourselves of the company that the hon. Member for Clacton wants to keep: Russia and Belarus—perhaps that should not surprise us either. He spends half his time as an apologist for the Kremlin, and he has the slight inconvenience of his party’s treasurer in Wales having been found guilty of taking bribes from Russian interests.
Let us remind ourselves what this is all about. The ECHR was created from the ashes of the second world war. It was designed to ensure that the atrocities of that dark time could never be repeated. It enshrines our freedoms of speech, to assemble, to worship, to protest and to live our private lives free from interference, and it is a living instrument that evolves as our society evolves. It is everything that the populists despise. Most of the time, we are not aware of the ECHR—most of our constituents probably do not know what is actually in the document—but it is always there, guaranteeing our freedoms and our rights. It does not seek attention; it simply ensures that the Government—any Government—act in a way that respects our rights. It is our silent guardian.
Leaving the ECHR will not stop the boats or allow the Government to deport masses of our fellow citizens, but it will tear holes in our domestic law. Since 1980, the European Court of Human Rights has found against the UK in just 13 cases, only four of them concerning family life. But those politicians do not just want to leave the ECHR; they want to repeal the Human Rights Act 1998 as well. They would seek to abolish its 16 core protections, leaving the UK as about the only country with no chapter on human rights.
I say this to Labour Members: instead of fully defending the ECHR, the Government accept the premise that there is something wrong with it—that it needs to be amended and made compliant with Government interests. They talk about article 8 as being redefined—
Steve Yemm (Mansfield) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge (Cat Eccles).
Let me begin by reaffirming my strong support for the United Kingdom’s continued commitment to the European convention on human rights. For more than 70 years, the ECHR has been a cornerstone of liberty and justice across Europe, defending free speech, safeguarding human rights and upholding the dignity of every individual. Those principles are as vital today as they have ever been, but supporting the ECHR does not mean turning a blind eye to where its application may have become unbalanced or detached from public understanding or support. I believe that the time has come for taking a serious and constructive view on its reform, not to weaken human rights, but to strengthen credibility and public confidence in the convention.
In particular, I believe that the interpretation of articles 3 and 8 has in a very small number of cases prevented the removal of foreign nationals with serious criminal convictions, even where their presence poses a clear risk to public safety. I hear that frustration again and again from my constituents in Mansfield. People who play by the rules expect those who break them to face the consequences, and when that does not happen, faith in the law and our institutions is undermined.
The status quo cannot remain, and my constituents in Mansfield are demanding action. That is why reform is needed—not to abandon our commitments, but to ensure that they reflect common sense, justice and the values of the British people in 2025. I welcome the recent comments by the president of the European Court of Human Rights suggesting that the Court is open to discussion and reform. That openness offers the UK a chance to engage and lead constructively, to modernise the convention, to clarify its boundaries, and to ensure that human rights protections continue to serve individual dignity, public safety, and what is more, public confidence. Let the UK remain a proud and leading member of the Council of Europe and the convention. That is the right and responsible way forward.
Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Ind)
It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Mundell. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge (Cat Eccles) on her outstanding speech, and other colleagues too.
I represent the city of York, which is England’s only UN human rights city, and our University of York hosts the Centre for Applied Human Rights. Human rights matter to my constituents, and human rights defenders from across the world come to our city. They come to our country because they recognise our strong framework around human rights. Human rights are in our DNA.
The Council of Europe’s work 75 years ago in establishing the European convention on human rights as the first instrument to crystallise and, through the Strasbourg Court, legally enforce the rights set out in the universal declaration of human rights, provided a vital route to justice—justice that must be upheld. We in our city have therefore developed our own framework around human rights, based on those established elsewhere, and we have called to account the institutions in our city on the issues of freedom, dignity and honest resolve.
The accountability of Governments, systems and actors is absolutely crucial. That is the role of the courts, and that is the role that the convention upholds. I have to ask why somebody would want to take away those rights or water them down. Is it because they want to subjugate? Is it because they want to violate? Is it because their interest is a world order where some should have fewer rights than others and where they have a God-given right to suppress the life of another and determine that their own flawed judgments should prevail?
I warn this Government, and all Governments in the future, not to mess with human rights. We need to uphold the dignity of all. We should never, never water down or undermine the frameworks that have served us so well for 75 years, and which must serve us well for 75 more.
Ms Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge (Cat Eccles) for securing this important debate.
George Orwell said:
“There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
I am not mad when I say that the debate on leaving the ECHR is nothing to do with immigration; I am telling the truth, which is something I hope the hon. Member for Great Yarmouth (Rupert Lowe) will finally come to realise. The convention is not designed to interfere with immigration policy; it says nothing about immigration, and the Court has long acknowledged the right of states to control their borders. That is why Oxford University data shows that only 3.5% of deportations of foreign criminals were successfully appealed on human rights grounds. That is the truth.
The fundamental purpose of the ECHR is to protect people from Governments of all colours. It stopped the Georgian Government arbitrarily detaining people. The Polish state has had to compensate thousands of citizens who had property taken away. Children in the Czech Republic were given rights to school. The failures of the French Government to tackle modern slavery were addressed. That is why apologists for authoritarian Governments such as the Russians hate it, and why they use immigration as a cover for their attacks. Now people want us to make the same mistake again—of walking away, not being in the room and isolating ourselves, as we did in Europe through Brexit—by walking away from the protection the ECHR offers our citizens: the protection that helped the Hillsborough families get justice, the protection that helped the victims of the black-cab rapist John Worboys, the protection that secured human rights and abortion access in Northern Ireland.
Even if people do not care about victims of crime or of miscarriages of justice, or about those who have been forced out of our armed forces for being gay, they might care about taxes. In February this year, the Court forced the Italians to stop a series of tax raids on companies because it was against their human rights. All of that—those basic rights—are at stake. And that is before we even get to the fact that it is the foundation of our trade agreements, and why other countries want to do business with us, that we follow the rule of law and hold ourselves accountable to a shared standard. That is why the ECHR is the foundation of the Good Friday agreement and is written into the EU trade and co-operation agreement, especially the deals on crime and policing.
Ms Creasy
My apologies, but I will not.
The Court also recognises the jurisdiction of nations. I reassure my hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield (Steve Yemm) that if he has problems with how the ECHR is interpreted, we can pass domestic laws to address that. I know that some in this room want the Court to be a bogeyman, but the truth is that it actually respects our rights, including democracy. That is why we were able to vote on the issue of prisoner voting.
What is not true is that any Government writing their own Bill of Rights would offer the same protection to our constituents. Any fool can see that a Government who set out what rights we have one day can take them away the next. A Bill of Rights without someone external to ensure that it is enforced is not worth the paper it is written on. That is why the international rule of law matters. Leaving the ECHR would give a future Government the power to weaken the rights of our constituents. It would bring us back to the chaos of Brexit. It would be an attack on our freedoms, not an advance of them. The truth may hurt, but it also sets you free.
David Mundell (in the Chair)
Sincere apologies to everyone I was not able to call. We now come to the Lib Dem spokesman, who has five minutes.
Dr Al Pinkerton (Surrey Heath) (LD)
Thank you, Mr Mundell. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I thank the hon. Member for Stourbridge (Cat Eccles) for securing this important debate, and other Members—most of them, at least—for their contributions.
The Council of Europe is one of the post-war generation’s quiet triumphs. It was Winston Churchill, speaking in Zurich in 1946, who called for the creation of a Council of Europe to safeguard peace and freedom across our continent. Just three years later, the UK became one of its 10 founding members, and from the outset it represented something profoundly British: a belief that democracy, human rights and the rule of law should not stop at our own shores; they are international values.
Of course, the Council’s crowning achievement is the European convention on human rights. For decades, the convention and the European Court of Human Rights, which enforces it, have protected the rights of millions, including our own citizens—defending free speech and fair trials, advancing equality for women, securing justice for our military veterans, the LGBT community and those with disabilities, and holding Governments of every colour to account.
Today, the Council of Europe, membership of which is predicated on ECHR adherence, helps us to combat terrorism, cyber-crime, corruption and money laundering, as well as human trafficking and other forms of organised crime, yet there are some in this House who would turn their back on that legacy and those instruments. They would align us with Russia, a nation expelled from the Council of Europe in 2022 after its unlawful invasion of our close ally Ukraine. Russia, our clearest adversary—that is the company that some would have us keep.
Sarah Russell
The only other country that has willingly left the ECHR is Greece, under the fascist military dictatorship in 1969. Of course, once the dictatorship was overthrown, it rejoined. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that that is not company that we wish to be in?
Dr Pinkerton
It is truly shameful company for us to maintain, and there is nothing virtuous or patriotic about calling for our withdrawal.
Indeed, those calling for withdrawal, in pursuit of a single policy objective—ending illegal migration—should heed a deeper warning. In “A Man for All Seasons”, the playwright Robert Bolt, through the character of Sir Thomas More, observes of England:
“This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down…do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”
If we cut down the laws that shield even the unpopular or the accused, we will soon find that there is no shelter left for any of us.
As authoritarianism rises and war returns to our continent, the Council’s role has never been more vital. Its expulsion of Russia was an act not of punishment, but of principle—a reminder that tyranny cannot co-exist with liberty. What becomes of Britain’s claim to moral leadership if we abandon the very human rights system we helped to build? What becomes of the rule of law, at home and abroad, if the United Kingdom decides that it no longer needs to be bound by it? Our rights—our particular British rights—have been formed over a millennium of conflict, struggle and reform. We surrender them at our peril.
Andrew Rosindell (Romford) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. I thank the hon. Member for Stourbridge (Cat Eccles) for securing this important debate, which is extremely topical, because this matter is being debated across the United Kingdom at the moment.
There is no doubt that the intentions behind the creation of the Council of Europe and the European convention on human rights were noble. In the aftermath of the second world war, Europe lay traumatised by tyranny. It was with the backing of the then Opposition leader—indeed, one of the greatest figures in British and world history—Sir Winston Churchill that the United Kingdom took a leading role in constructing a system intended to ensure that totalitarianism could never happen again.
Peter Prinsley (Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket) (Lab)
Will the hon. Member give way?
Andrew Rosindell
I will not, because time is very limited.
Yet Churchill had the foresight to say, on Europe:
“We help, we dedicate, we play a part, but we are not merged with and do not forfeit our insular or Commonwealth character…we are a separate—and specially-related ally and friend.”
I agree with Churchill. I believe in a Britain that co-operates, not a Britain that is subordinate to foreign judges and international bodies with no democratic accountability.
Those who claim that by leaving the ECHR we are somehow rolling back on human rights do a disservice to their ancestors, for Britain’s commitment to human liberty did not begin in 1950. It began centuries earlier—800 years before the convention was drafted, there was the principle of habeas corpus. Two decades before common-law courts were housed in the very hall in which we are having this debate today, Magna Carta of 1215 reaffirmed:
“No free man shall be…imprisoned…except by the lawful judgement of his peers and the law of the land.”
We produced, in succession, the Petition of Right in 1628, the Habeas Corpus Act in 1679 and the Bill of Rights in 1689, among a long list of other achievements.
We were the first nation in history that not only abolished slavery at home but dedicated the full force of our political, military and economic might to its global abolition. The crowning achievement was the island nation’s establishment of the premise of parliamentary sovereignty under a constitutional monarchy, which has been the envy of nations around the world.
Those achievements were not bestowed upon us by foreign courts or organisations. On the contrary, it was because of these British achievements that the ECHR came into existence, to instil in the nations of Europe that lacked such traditions the same freedoms that Britons had been enjoying for centuries. Last week, my hon. Friend the Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage) introduced a Bill proposing our withdrawal from the European convention on human rights, which I was proud to sponsor.
My right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition asked Lord Wolfson to conduct a thorough legal analysis of whether the United Kingdom can properly govern itself while remaining in the ECHR, with five core tests. It clearly indicated that the ability of the Government to control borders, to protect veterans from vexatious pursuit, to ensure that British citizens have priority in public services and to uphold Parliament’s decisions on sentencing and other matters without endless legal obstruction is significantly constrained by our ECHR membership. So a future Conservative Government will withdraw from the ECHR and repeal the Human Rights Act, so that the elected Government of the day can implement policies supported by the British people in a democratic election and uphold and strengthen human rights protections through our common law tradition, just as sovereign democracies such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand do, based on institutions and principles that originate from this very nation.
This is about democracy. It is this Parliament that should decide, not international bureaucrats or international judges—it is the British people, via a sovereign Parliament. That is the entire history of this country, and to jettison and give away that power is a shameful negation of the democratic birthright of the United Kingdom.
David Mundell (in the Chair)
Minister, the proceedings are due to conclude at 6.30 pm. You may wish to give Ms Eccles a few moments to wind up the debate.
The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Stephen Doughty)
Thank you, Mr Mundell. It is a genuine pleasure to see you in the Chair today.
I thank all hon. Members who have taken part in this lively and passionate debate. I particularly thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge (Cat Eccles) for securing it, and for her powerful list of the work done by the Council of Europe on everything from Ukraine to the death penalty. She mentioned the role of the ECHR, giving examples from Hillsborough to the Good Friday agreement. I thank her and other Members here today who are delegates to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe; it is a pleasure to engage with them regularly, and their work is crucial to our national interests.
In stark contrast to the polemical nonsense that we have just heard from the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend made a fundamental point, which is that fundamentally the ECHR and indeed the Council of Europe are British projects. It is the treaty of London that established them. I was very proud to see the treaty of London on display at the European Political Community summit two weeks after we came to power last year—and to see it at Blenheim Palace, with its strong historical associations to the man the shadow Minister was praising. I think he would have turned in his grave at some of the things that the shadow Minister was saying.
I also want to issue a general challenge: things cannot be set in aspic; they must evolve and maintain the confidence of all the British people and respond to the challenges and genuine issues that we face today. The point many colleagues made about the company that we keep is very important. It is not surprising to me at all to see Reform on the side of the likes of Russia and Belarus. It was very sad to hear some of the comments the shadow Minister made and that he was proud to support the hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage). Perhaps, like so many Tories, he is simply preparing himself for a rebrand under a new banner.
There were some strong speeches about the perils of leaving the ECHR and challenging the many myths and fake news, some of which we sadly heard in this debate. One of those is about the democratic nature of the Council of Europe, which is one of the most democratic bodies in Europe. The European Court of Human Rights is elected by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, including the UK judge, which flies in the face of what we heard from the shadow Minister and some others.
Other important points were made which have not previously had an adequate airing in debates on this subject. The arguments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Camborne and Redruth (Perran Moon) about the impact on national minorities were particularly strong. The ECHR ensures that all convention rights are enjoyed without discrimination, including on grounds such as race, language, religion or association with a national minority. Those crucial protections for national minorities could be lost if we left the ECHR. That is hugely important to Cornish and Welsh people and to those who speak our minority languages in the UK, including Cornish, Welsh, Gaelic and others. That is often forgotten.
Britain had a crucial and foundational role in establishing these institutions. Our pioneering Labour Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, was a strong advocate for the body; Sir Winston Churchill was another leading proponent of the Council, while the British lawyer Sir David Maxwell Fyfe played a central role in drafting the text of the convention. The UK was among the first states to ratify the convention. We are proud of the moral, political and legal leadership that Britain showed in creating the organisation and drafting a convention that was designed to help Europe recover from the horrors of the second world war. I know that there is controversy today, but the Government fundamentally believe that since their creation both the Council of Europe and the ECHR have delivered significant benefits to British citizens, and continue to do so. We are not afraid to say that.
The Lib Dem spokesperson, the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Dr Pinkerton), spoke powerfully about the wider work of the Council of Europe and the ECHR. There are more than 200 conventions under the Council of Europe, tackling terrorism, cyber-crime and corruption, countering money laundering, protecting children from sexual exploitation, confronting violence against women and girls and combating human trafficking and organised crime. It ensures that medicines are safe and effective, encourages economic growth, good governance and the rule of law, and supports freedom of expression and ethical media.
Linsey Farnsworth
On the subject of criminal co-operation, before I came into Parliament I was an international liaison prosecutor. My job was to get evidence from overseas and help to get people overseas in Europe extradited to the UK for prosecution. That work relies on the ECHR, which underpins that legislation. Does the Minister share my concern about what some Members in this Chamber are proposing? Does he agree that they should be the ones who talk to a victim of rape about why her case cannot go forward because we cannot get the evidence from a European country, or tell a mother that we cannot get the murderer of her son back because we have left the ECHR?
Stephen Doughty
My hon. Friend makes some incredibly powerful and strong points, with which I concur. She highlights the very serious consequences that could come were we to leave the ECHR.
Before I turn to some of the other specific points, I want to compliment the wider work of the Council of Europe and the Parliamentary Assembly in expelling Russia following the illegal invasion of Ukraine, supporting Ukraine and seeking to hold Russia to account for the atrocities it has committed. I also compliment its work on the register of damage, the international claims commissions and the special tribunal for the crime of aggression against Ukraine established under the auspices of the Council. Those, along with the activities that my hon. Friend just raised, all matter to the British public and to British public life.
Of course, the ECHR plays a crucial role in our constitutional framework. It is an important pillar of the devolution settlements, it underpins the guarantees in the Good Friday agreement, and it supports the safety and security of British citizens by facilitating cross-border law enforcement and judicial co-operation. The ECHR is often presented as some sort of foreign imposition that does nothing to help British people. That literally could not be further from the truth. It has contributed significantly to the protection and enforcement of human rights and equality standards in the UK. We are very proud that a Labour Government incorporated the ECHR into domestic law—that was, of course, a decision of Westminster—by introducing the Human Rights Act 1998, which came into force 25 years ago last month.
The ECHR has had a massive impact. ECHR rulings in 1982 led to the end of corporal punishment in schools in the UK and to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Northern Ireland. As has been referenced, in 1999, following a landmark case brought by two British servicepeople dismissed from the armed forces simply for being gay, an ECHR ruling led to the law being changed to allow members of the armed forces to be open about their sexuality. Another very powerful example concerns the impact of the Hillsborough disaster, which the Prime Minister has done much to lead on in recent months. The families of the 97 who lost their lives relied on the ECHR’s right to life provision when they campaigned for the truth. My hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Ms Creasy) spoke powerfully in this debate, including about the case of John Warboys. The benefits are not just historical; they affect live and significant cases that affect British people today.
Last, I turn to the question of reform. The strength of the convention is that, while the ECHR explicitly safeguards those at risk of harm, exclusion or discrimination, helps ordinary people to challenge unfair laws, and pushes Governments to respect rights, it is also entirely reasonable and appropriate for Governments consistently to consider whether the law, including the ECHR, is evolving to meet modern-day challenges, including on irregular migration, asylum and criminal justice. The ECHR was never designed to be set in stone and frozen forever in the time that it was created. That is why we are working with and engaging with European partners to look at ways in which reform can go forward, and why we are reviewing the way in which the ECHR is interpreted in UK domestic law.
Stephen Doughty
I will not, because I want to give time for my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge to wind up.
We need to ensure that we retain public confidence in our policies related to the ECHR, so we must look at where we can reform and evolve. Last week, the secretary-general of the Council of Europe was clear that he was open to discuss potential changes or adaptations—my hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield (Steve Yemm) raised that important point. Other Council of Europe member states share the UK’s view that the ECHR needs to evolve. We are talking to them about what might be possible, but we will not leave the ECHR. We recognise the hugely important role that it plays, and the hugely important role that the Council of Europe plays for people in this country. This is something that Britain was involved in at the start. It is not a foreign imposition; it plays an important role in the life of the British people. I thank all hon. Members for their contributions to this debate.
Cat Eccles
I thank all hon. Members who have participated in this interesting and lively debate. I thank my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan), the hon. Members for Great Yarmouth (Rupert Lowe) and for Perth and Kinross-shire (Pete Wishart), and my hon. Friends the Members for Mansfield (Steve Yemm), for York Central (Rachael Maskell), for Camborne and Redruth (Perran Moon), and for Walthamstow (Ms Creasy) for their contributions. I am sure that my hon. Friends who have not been able to contribute to the debate also had excellent points to make. It is clear that this discussion must continue.
In marking the 75th anniversary of the ECHR, we are reminded of its founding purpose: to safeguard dignity, freedom and justice. That remains as vital today as it was at the start. Far from being outdated, the ECHR has evolved into a cornerstone of European democracy, promoting equality, accountability and the rule of law across all 46 member states. Yet misinformation, false narratives and political opportunism now threaten to erode that legacy. Sovereignty gives us the right to be party to international treaties. The facts are clear: the ECHR does not hinder deportation or weaken our sovereignty. If we were to leave, it would be short-term gain for long-term pain. As pressures mount to dilute or abandon our commitments, we must stand firm. Britain helped to build the ECHR, and we must continue to defend it.