British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will maybe, possibly consider finally taking the UK out of the European Court of Human Rights should it continue blocking pro-border control measures in the country.
The UK government is once again supposedly mulling pulling the country out of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) amid problems with the European court associated with it preventing pro-border control laws from being implemented in the country.
While the threat is being reported in UK paper of record The Sunday Times, it does not mean however that any action against the court will necessarily be taken by the government anytime soon, with authorities in the Tory Party having talked about pulling out of the ECHR for numerous years to no avail.
According to the publication, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is once again considering getting the UK to leave the human rights accord and replacing it with something more appropriate to the British legal tradition, which is distinct from the European. Sunak is reportedly open to dumping the agreement and its associated court should it block a planned law aimed at curbing the ongoing English Channel migrant crisis from being implemented
“The PM has been clear he wants to introduce legislation that meets our international obligations,” the publication reports a source close to Sunak as saying.
“This bill will go as far as possible within international law,” the source continued. “We are pushing the boundaries of what is legally possible, while staying within the ECHR. And we are confident that when it is tested in the courts, we will win.”
“But if this legislation gets onto the statute book and is found to be lawful by our domestic courts, but it is still being held up in Strasbourg, then we know the problem is not our legislation or our courts,” they went on to say. “If that’s the case, then of course he will be willing to reconsider whether being part of the ECHR is in the UK’s long-term interests.”
While this could be seen as a welcome announcement by many concerned with the poor state of the UK’s borders, the message that Sunak may be willing to pull out of the ECHR is significantly undercut simply by how often the Tory party has threatened to leave the arrangement, and realistically how long the government has to make such moves before the next general election.
Then-Prime Minister Theresa May had been threatening to take Britain out of the court all the way back in 2016, attacking the European court for blocking the extradition of extremist Abu Hamza for years.
Over half a decade of inaction on the part of the Tory party later, the court is still preventing migrants from being deported from the UK, with the country’s hare-brained scheme to send migrants to Rwanda being all but scuttled before it could get off the ground by the court last year.
However, the ECHR is far from the only thing the Conservatives have failed to act upon, with the chaos at the centre of this latest dispute with the ECHR — the English Channel Migrant Crisis — having been barely addressed by the governing party for nearly half a decade.
Despite having labelled it a “major incident” all the way back in 2018, multiple Conservative Prime Ministers have failed to take any concrete action to end the border crisis, with Boris Johnson’s attempt to deploy the British navy to end the crossings failing abysmally, as the force devolved into rescuing migrants and ferrying them into the country themselves.
The mission to stop the crisis, which pundits have described as having has deteriorated into a glorified “taxi service” by its end, was finally wound up late last year, with the task of managing the crisis being given back to the UK Home Office.
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