"Human rights” culture is now an active threat to the rule of law
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Boris Johnson's Rwanda deportation policy has descended into a circular farce.
The British government wanted to deport illegal asylum-seekers to Rwanda, under an agreement reached with that country. It intended to fly out the first such group yesterday.
A succession of appeals by human rights layers had reduced the proposed number of deportees from 130 to seven. Last night, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg ruled against the removal of the migrants — who included an Iraqi, an Iranian, a Vietnamese and an Albanian — thus grounding the flight half an hour before it was due to leave.
Since the Rwanda policy was largely an attempt to escape the trap imposed by the European Convention on Human Rights to which the UK is a signatory, the loudest sound from the court’s ruling last night was the trap snapping shut.
The government devised this desperate and inherently absurd Rwanda gambit because it had found it impossible to stop the trade in people-smuggling that has brought thousands of illegal asylum-seekers across the English Channel in a steady stream of inflatables and other profoundly un-seaworthy craft. These have regularly capsized and caused many drownings.
As The Times reports (£), an estimated 400 migrants arrived in small boats yesterday, taking the total who have crossed the Channel this year to more than 10,500 — triple the number that had arrived by this time last year.
All attempts to stop this traffic have failed, including intercepting boats to return them to France (migrants threatened to drown themselves, requiring rescue under international law), paying the French to take them back and pressuring France to shut down the tented encampments of immigrants waiting to cross the Channel.
These attempts have failed for one overwhelming reason. Britain is the greatest magnet in the world for illegal immigrants because Britain is where they know they will not only be able to receive welfare benefits and not be harassed by the police or other authorities but also, and most important, they will never be sent back.
And the reason for that is in large measure the European Convention on Human Rights, which made it illegal for them to be deprived of benefits or sent away because of its clauses enshrining the right to family life and other entitlements. The convention has similarly made all but impossible other attempts over the years to control immigration or remove terrorist sympathisers and others deemed to be a threat to the state.
The government understands very well that it needs to stop Britain being such a magnet. But the reason it resorted to the Rwanda option is because it refuses to confront the reason Britain is a magnet in the first place — that it is the softest touch in the world for illegal migration and human trafficking because it has shackled itself to the Human Rights Convention.
As I have repeatedly written, it is obvious that Britain cannot control its own borders and immigration policy as long as it remains a signatory to the convention. Attempts to draw its sting by home-grown human rights laws (the government is promising yet another such attempt in a new bill of rights) will always founder while the final court of appeal remains the ECHR.
Any suggestion that Britain should leave the convention (hinted at by Boris Johnson yesterday, but don’t hold your breath) is always met with hysterical fury from human rights lawyers and liberals signed up to the notion that human rights exist only in the legal no-man’s land of international law. Leaving the convention, they cry, would tell the world that Britain has torn up human rights.
This is ridiculous. Britain is the crucible of liberty precisely because rights were never previously codified. In Britain’s historic legal culture, everything was permitted unless it was prohibited.
As soon as rights are codified they become contingent and conditional, dependent on judges deciding between rights that compete with each other — just as they do in the European convention. Far from being universal, rights depend on fallible judges making subjective, ideological or political assessments of the strength of each right relative to the others.
Last night’s ECHR ruling was particularly outrageous because the deportations to Rwanda had been declared lawful by the UK Supreme Court. This has now been effectively overruled by a foreign court, on which a British judge sits alongside judges from other countries — including that bastion of human rights, Russia.
The authority of the ECHR derives from the belief that human rights are universal and therefore trump national laws. This is philosophically incoherent and fundamentally undemocratic.
In a democracy, laws have authority because they are made by parliaments elected by the people and which give expression to the culture, beliefs and principles of that people. International law, based on treaties or other agreements between nations, is anchored in no such jurisdiction.
Understandably dubbed “politics by legal means,” it is founded on a belief that arose from the experience of German Nazism. This was that no nation can be trusted to protect the lives and liberties of its own citizens, and that protection can only be guaranteed by a universal system of law.
That argument was an understandable reaction to the Holocaust which the world failed to prevent. But the idea that international law would have stopped Hitler is risible. Tyrants are only stopped if they are fought and defeated. And in seeking to uphold democratic freedoms, international human rights law has instead undermined them.
For the idea that rights are universal and exist beyond individual cultures is not only false but dangerous. Rights don’t exist in a moral vacuum, bestowed upon us through some kind of supra-national alchemy. They are derived from the duties and obligations we owe each other.
Detaching human rights from any such framework of duties and obligations has created a system of universal entitlement, with the power to make what are ultimately arbitrary decisions that trump the right of individual nations to make their own laws.
Hence the situation which has now developed in Britain, where a policy to combat illegal activity has itself been ruled illegal by a foreign court with no democratic authority derived from any jurisdiction — and which has overruled the justice system that does possess such democratic authority.
The Rwanda issue is splitting Britain along all too familiar lines — between those who are deeply committed to the rule of law and the integrity of their nation, and those who are not and who hide this behind sanctimonious virtue-signalling about “compassion” for “refugees” (which most asylum-seekers crossing the Channel are not, unless you think France is a country from which people genuinely seek refuge).
The liberal intelligentsia and establishment call the Rwanda policy “inhumane”, “cruel” and “callous”. These are epithets they studiously avoid using against the people-smugglers who fleece would-be migrants before cynically loading them into inflatables which may capsize and drown them.
Much of the rest of the country, aghast at the unstoppable tide of illegal immigrants, is solidly behind the government and wants its Rwanda policy — or any policy to deal with the problem — to work. But this society’s combination of a sense of entitlement with sentimentality and a culture of impunity has created a growing monster.
Last Saturday, police officers in Peckham, south London who were attempting to arrest a Nigerian man who was said to have overstayed his visa were confronted by an angry crowd of about 200 protesters who blocked the police van in which the man was being transported. Demonstrators shouted “let him go,” while others sat down in front of the van and prevented it from leaving.
The police gave up, released the man and retreated. The Guardian reported:
Claudia Webbe, the independent MP for Leicester East, commended the protesters’ “humanity and solidarity” on Twitter: “This is people power — so beautiful to see.”The organisation Lewisham Anti-Raids tweeted: “After 4 hours of resistance and a crowd of 200 people they’re letting our neighbour go! People power wins. We’re shouting ‘don’t come back to Peckham!’”
The Mail reported:
At least three Labour councillors including a self-styled Marxist primary school teacher led the blockade… Southwark councillor James McAsh raised awareness about the raid with a tweet at 3.05pm calling on campaigners to amass as the immigration raid got underway…Refugees for Justice manager Savan Qadir, who is based in Glasgow, was another important voice during yesterday's protest…Qadir described the raid yesterday as “Another failed attempt to kidnap migrants” and has described the government’s Rwanda plan as “state trafficking”…Brighton's anti-Israel Boycott, Divest and Sanction campaign Twitter account wrote: “Solidarity to community resisting immigration raid right now in Peckham. More numbers needed”.Campaign group Lewisham Anti-Raids, which says on its Twitter page that it leads community resistance to immigration raids in Lewisham, wrote: “Please come join us at Evan Cook Close, Queen's Road Peckham — we need more people to stand with us and resist our neighbour being taken away. Together, we can win!”
This “human rights” culture is now an active threat to the rule of law in Britain.
