Nearly 300 organisations have issued a rallying cry for a “full-throated defence” of the European Convention on Human Rights – accusing politicians of using it as a scapegoat with devastating effects.
The ECHR, an international treaty signed by 47 Council of Europe member states to protect fundamental human rights, has come under fire from both Reform UK and the Tories, who have pledged to quit the convention if they win the next election.
In response, groups ranging from Liberty to Refuge, health charity Parkinson’s UK and the Centre for Military Justice have warned that the ECHR protects “the rights of ordinary people every day up and down the country from victims of sexual violence to LGBT+ service personnel, public interest journalists to mental health patients”.
They have accused politicians of “using our human rights as a scapegoat…. [and] escalating, irresponsible rhetoric targeting migrant and minoritised communities, which has devastating real-world consequences”.
Sam Grant, director of external affairs at Liberty, which organised the statement from 292 organisations, said: “There are people in powerful positions who want us to believe that we would be better off without the ECHR – don’t believe them.
“For decades our human rights laws have underpinned all of our daily lives by giving us the ability to speak freely, love who we want, and live in peace. These rights were hard-won and we must not allow governments now or in the future to take them away.”
The statement, which has been signed by organisations including Ben & Jerry’s, Shelter, Mind, Disability Action and the Centre for Women’s Justice, argues the ECHR “is fundamental to our democracy and enables ordinary people, of all backgrounds, to hold the state and public bodies accountable”.
Developed after the Second World War, with the UK playing a leading role, the ECHR and the Human Rights Act (HRA), which incorporates it into British law, “have protected the rights of ordinary people every day up and down the country; from victims of sexual violence to LGBT+ service personnel, public interest journalists to mental health patients and victims of serious injustice (from Hillsborough to Windrush)”, the groups said.
“The ECHR helped bring peace finally in Northern Ireland, through the Good Friday Agreement, and has improved the quality of public services. We reject the narrative that human rights are not in the interests of the public – everyone in our society would be much worse off without these key protections”.
Attacks on the ECHR, they say, have “often been based on myths, over-simplifications, inaccuracies, and scaremongering, particularly around migration.”
Leaving the convention would not solve problems like the backlog of asylum cases or migrants taking dangerous small boats across the Channel, they said, “but would bring about years of legal uncertainty, undermine our international position, and cause harm to the rights of both migrants in the UK and our wider communities”.
They called on politicians to stop “using our human rights as a scapegoat, level with the British public about the significant costs of ECHR withdrawal (such as the impact on the Good Friday Agreement) and end the escalating, irresponsible rhetoric targeting migrant and minoritised communities, which has devastating real-world consequences for people who are often already made vulnerable by wider social and economic marginalisation and stigmatisation.”
They also call on Sir Keir Starmer and the Labour government “to make the positive case for our human rights protections and how they empower ordinary people across the UK” adding “Now is the time for a full-throated defence of the ECHR and HRA.”
The fightback against moves to scrap the ECHR comes just weeks after Tory leader Kemi Badenoch announced she would withdraw from the international treaty if she won the next election, leading former Tory attorney general Dominic Grieve to accuse her of a death wish for her party.
Mrs Badenoch’s move to the right came as part of a bid to reverse her party’s decline in the face of the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK – who just last week attempted to bring forward legislation for the UK to quit the convention.
The move was blocked by MPs, who voted against the motion to bring forward a bill by 96 to 154, majority 58.
Andrea Simon, executive director of the End Violence Against Women argued the ECHR is a “crucial tool” in the fight to end violence against women and girls, “providing victims and survivors with access to support, safety and justice when they are failed by the state”.
“The ECHR means police have a duty to investigate VAWG, and that frontline support services can demand that local authorities protect women and girls at immediate risk, by providing alternative housing for survivors of domestic abuse. Violence against women and girls is entirely preventable, and it relies on a world with human rights for all”, she said.
In her annual conference speech in Manchester last month, Mrs Badenoch said: “Well-meaning treaties and statutes, like the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Convention on action against Trafficking, drafted with the best of intentions in generations gone by … are now being used in ways never intended by their original authors.”
Meanwhile, Mr Farage has said that leaving the convention was the “unfinished business” of Brexit, saying the UK is “not sovereign all the while we are part of the ECHR”.
A government spokesperson said:“We have been clear that the UK will remain a member of the European Convention on Human Rights as we do not need to withdraw to deliver meaningful reform.”