Can reforms save the European Convention on Human Rights?

In a recent decision at an immigration court in London a judge allowed a violent foreign criminal to stay in Britain. Olajide Olayemi Shinaba, a 32-year-old Nigerian man, had lunged at a female acquaintance with a knife in front of her child. The Home Office argued that deporting him would be “conducive to the public good”. Mr Shinaba appealed, arguing that removal would separate him from his British children, and so violate his right to family life, protected by the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The judge agreed.

Pressure is mounting to do something about Britain’s relationship with the convention and the court in Strasbourg which is its ultimate enforcer. Reform UK, ahead in the polls, says it would pull Britain out on its first day in office. The Conservatives now also back withdrawal.

The left has been the ECHR’s main champion. Labour introduced the Human Rights Act when previously in power, incorporating the ECHR into domestic law. Sir Keir Starmer, the prime minister, is a former human-rights barrister who wrote a 900-page textbook on the topic. Yet his party, too, is hardening its stance. His government plans to legislate to tighten how British officials and judges apply the rules.

Britain is also one of several members—including Austria, Denmark and Italy—pressing for reform. A summit in Moldova in May offers a chance to change how the ECHR works. Member states want to carve out more freedom to interpret Article 3 (protection from torture and degrading treatment) and Article 8 (the right to a private and family life) as they see fit.

British politicians have long used the convention as a punching bag. Crucially, Britain is not in the EU, which makes leaving easier, since EU membership in effect commits countries to the ECHR. Britain was the first state to ratify the convention, in 1951. Its next government could walk away, to enable it to deport more people.

The ECHR constrains Britain in three ways: in decisions by the court in Strasbourg; in those by British courts; and in decisions taken at the Home Office, as officials weigh up the risk that a deportation effort will be blocked by a judge.

The first of these has only a small direct impact. Since 1980 the Strasbourg court has overruled Britain in an extradition or deportation case just 13 times. However, it can be explosive. A temporary order to block a deportation flight to Rwanda under the previous, Conservative government was held up by critics as a gross overreach.

The second has a much bigger effect. British judges enforce the ECHR day in, day out. Their most controversial judgments involve foreign criminals like the Nigerian knife-wielder. In a more typical case last year, another Nigerian man claimed permission to stay because his partner’s 89-year-old mother required medical care, which would have been disrupted by his leaving. In 2015-16 and 2024-25 there were over 360,000 appeals against the Home Office in the lower immigration court, 115,000 of them about human rights. The claimants won more than half of the latter group.

Third, civil servants will not try to expel someone they think will win a legal challenge. Such self-censorship means the convention’s influence ripples out into “thousands of decisions every week”, says one former adviser to the justice ministry.

The ECHR is not the only instrument that limits Britain’s room for manoeuvre. The country is also signed up to the UN Convention against Torture and the UN Refugee Convention. Reform wants to leave those treaties as well. Still, right-wing critics see the ECHR as their main target.

What they overlook is the difficulty of leaving and the costs of doing so. Membership is written into the Good Friday Agreement, which brought peace to Northern Ireland, as well as Britain’s exit treaty with the EU. And the ECHR, whatever its flaws, is an independent check on government. It helped block corporal punishment in British schools and permitted gay people to serve in the armed forces. It is not just human-rights purists who balk at the thought of losing that layer of protection.

Labour is hoping to prove that it can secure Britain’s borders without abandoning the ECHR. Four-fifths of Labour voters support the convention, according to YouGov, a pollster. So do most Britons: among those with an opinion, almost half say they want to stay in, compared with less than a third who would leave.

The government wants to tighten how the ECHR is interpreted at home. It thinks too many people win immigration claims by citing “exceptional” family ties. Labour will introduce laws requiring judges and officials to take a stricter view of what constitutes “family”, and to put more emphasis on the public interest in removing someone. Similar changes made by the Conservative-led coalition in 2014, focused on deporting more criminals, worked well.

At the gathering in Moldova no one expects the text of the ECHR to change. But member states have agreed to issue a declaration on how the convention should work in practice. They hope this will stop people using bad health care and dodgy prisons in their home country as a way to avoid removal. Would a mere declaration be toothless? Research suggests a previous one in 2012 had an impact. The Strasbourg court’s president, Mattias Guyomar, has said it would be mindful of the broader “context” in applying the rules, but also stressed the importance of the court’s “full independence”. None of this is likely to halt the right-wing momentum to quit. ■