Jack Straw urges Starmer to back away from ECHR

Telegraph

15-03-2025

Jack Straw, a former Labour home secretary, has urged Sir Keir Starmer to back away from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
Mr Straw has questioned the 'utility' of Britain being bound by the convention and said human rights are 'safe enough' under existing UK law.
The Cabinet veteran, who also served as foreign secretary and justice secretary under Sir Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, criticised the lack of a 'democratic override' on the Strasbourg court that enforces the convention.
He also said the court's judgements were of 'lower quality' than those delivered by British judges.
He cited the Human Rights Act (HRA), introduced by Sir Tony's government, as an adequate guarantee of rights. Mr Straw is the first Labour grandee to call for Britain to reconsider its position on the ECHR.
This week it was revealed that Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, is reviewing how an article that guarantees the right to family life is being applied by immigration judges.
The Home Secretary wishes to ensure that it is being applied in a 'sensible' and 'proportionate' way.
It follows a number of cases reported in The Telegraph that revealed how Article 8 was being used to keep foreign criminals in Britain.
These included an instance where an Albanian criminal won the right to stay in the UK after claiming his son had an aversion to foreign chicken nuggets, citing the convention.
In another case, a Pakistani paedophile jailed for child sex offences evaded deportation by claiming it would be 'unduly harsh' on his own children.
On another occasion a Jamaican drug dealer avoided deportation after he promised to only smoke cannabis and not sell it. The man claimed that being deported back to Jamaica would breach his rights to a family life under Article 8 as he had three young children in the UK with his wife.
Mr Straw wrote in a letter to The Times: 'Given the undoubted success of the HRA, the question that must now arise is: what utility is there in the UK being bound any more into the Strasbourg court? Not much, is my answer. The convention articles are safe enough within our own HRA.'
The HRA enshrined key ECHR rights into UK law, meaning that appeals could be made in British courts rather than in the Strasbourg court, which is made up of 46 judges from the member states of the Council of Europe.
And Mr Straw appeared to throw his weight behind Government plans to water down Article 8 of the ECHR, which has been repeatedly used to block deportations.
Writing in The Telegraph, Sir Michael Ellis, a former attorney general, has also called for Britain to leave the convention because 'it's a body that has badly lost its way'.
Sir Michael argued that 'it protects not the rights of society but those of the antisocial'.
He wrote: 'It's time for the UK to take our leave. Yes, the left will squeal and portray the UK as falling into despotism – but they will be wrong. The ECHR is not sacrosanct, it isn't the high priest of jurisprudence, whose words will be imparted through the Eons like the wisdom of Solomon. It's a body that has badly lost its way. It protects not the rights of society but those of the antisocial. It damages respect for the law with its offensive and highly damaging rulings.
'Withdrawal from the ECHR will not be a panacea to the UK's problems with international law. Our lexocracy (my word for the rule of lawyers, rather than the rule of law) also includes our own Human Rights Act, as well as a rather out of control concept of judicial review and other problems which have allowed our judges to become a law unto themselves. These things will all have to be addressed – but withdrawing from the ECHR would be an important first step.'
Lord Sumption, a former Supreme Court justice and one of the country's most senior legal minds, has also called for Britain to leave the convention, saying it lacks democratic accountability and has 'arrogated to itself the right to decide between competing public interests'.
When he ran to be leader of the Conservative Party, Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, also advocated withdrawing from the ECHR.
Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader, has yet to make a decision on whether it is her party's policy to leave the ECHR.