Britain’s island mentality

Britain’s migrant policy and the decision to adopt legislation that is avowedly incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights highlights a blind-sighted totemic deference to parliamentary sovereignty (“The buck stops way over there”, April 15th).

Assuredly, Lord Hoffmann could write in 1999 that “Parliamentary sovereignty means that Parliament can, if it chooses, legislate contrary to fundamental principles of human rights. The Human Rights Act 1998 will not detract from this power.” The problem nevertheless goes beyond Tory obsession with parliamentary sovereignty (“take back control”) and the ECHR.

As pointed out in the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling of November 15th 2023, due consideration must be given to other instruments of international law (for example, the 1951 Refugee Convention) as well as domestic law (the Nationality, Immigration, and Asylum Act). When unwrapping the legal niceties of the Safety of Rwanda bill we are left with legal fiction (Rwanda is safe) and a desperate gamble to save the day at the next general election. What remains are inevitable legal challenges and the country’s reputation as a champion of the international rule of law lying in tatters.

John Donne famously wrote, “No man is an island”. Britain, an island, is embedded in a sea of international norms that it entered into of its own volition. Britain cannot go it alone. Its migrant policy and the plight of tens of thousands of asylum-seekers depends on compliance with the rules it willingly agreed to.

F.R. VAN DER MENSBRUGGHE

Professor at the University of Louvain in Brussels