Sunak’s key allies may revolt if he ditches human rights treaty
RISHI SUNAK could face a Cabinet revolt if he lays plans for Britain to quit Europe’s human rights convention, it has been claimed.
At least 12 Cabinet ministers would oppose leaving the treaty and the Strasbourg court, according to analysis.
The dozen sceptics include Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, Home Secretary James Cleverly, Justice Secretary Alex Chalk and Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris, it was reported.
It could set the Conservative Party on a self-destruct course if Mr Sunak decides to promise changes to Britain’s membership of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
The Prime Minister last week appeared to shift his position when he said ‘border security and making sure that we can control illegal migration is more important than membership of a foreign court’.
Whitehall insiders believe Mr Sunak’s remarks indicate he is minded to pledge reform in his election manifesto. But division within Tory ranks, as reported by The Times, means it is unlikely the PM will opt for a rigid promise to exit the ECHR.
Other ministers said to oppose leaving the ECHR include Education Secretary Gillian Keegan and Health Secretary Victoria Atkins. Former justice secretary Sir Robert Buckland said it would be ‘disastrous for the Conservative Party’.
It comes as a survey by polling company Savanta showed 49 per cent of Conservative voters think the UK should no longer be a member of the ECHR. By contrast, 52 per cent of the public, as a whole, believe the UK should remain in the treaty.
WHO wouldn’t be charmed by the Swiss grannies of KlimaSeniorinnen the — the ‘Climate Seniors’ — who have just won a signal victory in the European Court of Human Rights?
Perhaps that’s what Greenpeace calculated when it helped form the women’s campaign a few years back. If so, it’s a tactic that has richly borne fruit.
Yesterday, the ECHR ruled that the Swiss government can be sued because its climate policies breach the ‘human rights’ of the group’s 24,000 members. As heartfelt and well-meaning as the greyhaired seniors might have seemed on last night’s television news, this is a deeply troubling judgment.
Democracy
For a start, it opens the door to a stream of similar cases against nation states including Britain (which, despite Brexit, remains subservient to the ECHR). And, to judge from this ruling, governments are bound to lose many or most of these legal actions.
People really will start to believe that countries are responsible for ‘eco- crimes’ against a galaxy of other presumed rights: a perversion of law and politics that will prove costly and disruptive.
The Climate Seniors had argued that, as older women, they were more ‘vulnerable’ to heatwaves than the rest of the population, and that the Swiss government had somehow ‘discriminated’ against them by failing to do more to stop the planet from warming. The ECHR, in its pampered wisdom, agreed.
What a grotesque legal landgrab. An international-rights framework, shaped in the dark aftermath of World War II to prevent atrocities such as the Holocaust from re- occurring, had been extended to stop grannies in one of the richest countries from feeling the heat.
But the ruling is more than merely absurd: it poses a threat to democracy. Greenpeace, the Climate Seniors and the phalanxes of lawyers and judges enabling them represent nothing less than an insurgency. A powerful movement determined to effect political change while bypassing awkward things like democratic debate.
And their methods are underpinned by what I call ‘ critical law theory’ — in which an intractably woke legal system is used to determine how the rest of us should run our lives.
You’ve probably heard of ‘critical race theory’, that discredited doctrine of academia and the Black Lives Matter movement which holds that the West is irredeemably ‘white supremacist’ and must be overhauled to favour minorities. Critical law theory, peddled as it is by powerful, yet unaccountable, lawyers and judges on the backs of equally progressive lobbyists, is more far- reaching and destructive still.
Consider, for example, the charities and law firms devoted to thwarting the Government’s meek attempts to control its borders by mounting endless taxpayer-funded legal manoeuvres to keep foreign criminals on British soil, on the laughable grounds of their ‘human rights’.
Or look at the trans-activist charity Stonewall and its attempts both to assign to history Britain’s traditional understanding of biological sex and to peddle a disputed ideology in the classroom.
Stonewall seeks seismic social changes by lobbying Government, business and the civil service. It scorns the ballot box. And its techniques have been chillingly effective — the suppression of free speech when it comes to gender identity, ironically by those who are all too happy to exploit the language of rights and the law of ‘ hate crimes’ to enforce their will.
Most of all, however, I see critical law theory operating in Brussels, where I live and work: the capital of rightsbased advocacy and home to an army of lawyers growing fat on the proceeds. The theory maintains that courts exist not to interpret statute, as has traditionally been the case in continental Europe, but to change the law according to the thoughts and prejudices of the presiding judges, and the lawyers and campaigners who brief them.
As the head of a think-tank in the Belgian capital, I come across these professional advocates every day. Filling conference rooms, corridors and bars, they are young, mostly in their 20s and 30s.
They are well-meaning and plausible. They are committed to their cause, be it climate change or trans ideology. And they hold an unshakeable belief that they alone possess the truth.
Most people don’t realise it, but campaigns, charities and other non- governmental groups — ‘stakeholders’ to use the dismal language of the human-rights industry — are responsible for the bulk of the cases considered by the ECHR, not individuals. The Swiss Climate Seniors are a case in point: a media-friendly front for the massive lobbying power of Greenpeace.
Bypassing democratic politics, such groups view the ECHR not as a neutral arbiter but as a handy agent of political change.
Retreat
So let me be clear: hijacking the law in this way is secretive, coercive and profoundly dangerous. We have allowed a small number of people to gain grotesquely disproportionate power over the lives of others: people who misuse the concept of ‘human rights’ to legitimise their worldview.
In 2019, former Supreme Court judge Jonathan Sumption issued a warning in his powerful Reith Lectures. The most distinguished legal mind of his generation argued that we are allowing judges and the courts to govern our lives while, at the same time, watching politics retreat.
It is impractical, it is dangerous and, ultimately, in ignoring political debate, it is inhuman. And yet the march of critical law theory continues — with ‘human rights’ at the heart of it. First established as a set of laudable principles following the conflagration of two world wars, such rights have exploded in number and scope.
A vast and still- expanding industry has been spawned, creating its own dynamic and weighing down upon the legal system.
But today, most people in Britain still instinctively think of responsibilities, not ‘rights’. We understand the compromises needed in a complex society with a long history, and the sacrifices that individuals must make.
Insanity
Yet despite our departure from the EU’s stranglehold, our lives are ever more constrained by ‘ human rights’ laws minted in Brussels and applied, without discussion or consent, by our own courts.
The people behind this campaign are all the more effective because many are — like the Climate Seniors — sincere in their beliefs. It is therefore a profound irony that their ‘ non- political’ image has proved an advantage. Because they are profoundly political.
Many, particularly in the legal profession, project themselves as moral gods. And we stupidly take them at their own estimate.
Having seen this trend for what it is, I am in no doubt that Britain must withdraw from the ECHR. We have no need of it. We have our own courts, our own judges — and centuries of our own law, thank you very much.
It is we who must determine what is in our own interests, not lawyers, and certainly not judges in a foreign capital.
This week’s ruling is not only bad in its own right; it shows how irredeemably political the ornate structure of European ‘justice’ has become.
A general election is approaching. If Rishi Sunak really does wish to withdraw from the ECHR — and I profoundly hope he does — he is leaving it very late indeed.
This latest insanity from Brussels makes it more than clear: the time for action is now.