Council of Europe and the European Convention on Human Rights

Cat Eccles Excerpts

Wednesday 5th November 2025 Westminster Hall

[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Is the convention really so out of date and out of time, as its critics argue?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 is absolutely right.

--- Later in debate ---

[David Mundell (in the Chair)]

The debate may continue until 6.30 pm.

[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.”

[David Mundell (in the Chair)]

I call Paul Kohler. You have three minutes.

--- Later in 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.