Human rights lawyers are overplaying their hand
It's hard to think of a more inflammatory push at a time when the strength of the connections between many of the Afghans and the UK Armed Forces is being questioned – with MoD insiders saying that for every genuine claimant on the list, up to 16 could be bogus. But lawyers, nevertheless, intend to argue that anyone on the list could qualify for relocation to the UK – even if they have no connection to Britain and their claim for resettlement is spurious at best.
It is true that the UK will not have genuine national sovereignty over matters of immigration and asylum unless it re-evaluates its relationship with the ECHR and the 1951 Refugee Convention. These are outdated conventions which came into effect in the 1950s, which have not been modernised to keep pace with the growing ease of international movement and transformative technological change.
The democratically-elected government of the UK should not be at the mercy of a Strasbourg-based supranational court – especially when it comes to determining immigration and asylum policy on the grounds of national security, social cohesion, and public order. It is a major transparency deficit which lies at the heart of a struggling democracy where immigration is a leading concern among the British public. The grounding of the Rwanda flights under the last Tory government by a ruling made by the European Court of Human Rights, demonstrated that we cannot be a truly democratic nation-state whilst being a member of it.
But to suggest that withdrawing from the ECHR and the 1951 Refugee Convention would be some sort of magic bullet and automatically shore up our national borders is wide of the mark. What is required is a radical overhaul of the Human Rights Act (which currently requires UK judges to interpret domestic legislation and make rulings which are compatible and consistent with the provisions of the ECHR) and judicial review (the process where the policy actions of the government are subject to review by the judiciary).
And of course, all this needs to be backed by significant amounts of political willpower – the kind that simply does not exist among the British political establishment, which includes far too many MPs who are more respectful of their own legal background than the mainstream preferences of the British electorate on matters of border security and public safety.
While I supported the UK's withdrawal from the European Union following the June 2016 referendum on the UK's membership, it is vital that we resist the tendency to externalise blame for the UK's problems on international institutions based outside of it.
Our domestic human-rights architecture is not fit for purpose and it is clear as day that an uncomfortable number of UK judges tend to rule in favour of prioritising the rights of foreign nationals over the security of British citizens. And perhaps most crucially of all, the political rise of lawyers such as the current Prime Minister – empty suits ultimately shaped by international conventions – has meant little to no genuine action has taken place when it comes to immigration and asylum policy.
While much of the focus is understandably on a supranational foreign court which all too often overreaches, many of the UK's problems with immigration and asylum are connected to institutions, laws, and processes at home.
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