Foreign Secretary Lord Cameron has warned the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) they every time it “overreaches itself” it “plants the seeds of its own destruction.”
Lord Cameron told the House of Lords on Tuesday the government had no plans to pull out of the ECHR or leave the Council of Europe.
But he said there were “moments of extreme frustration.”
A Boeing 767 that was set to take seven illegal immigrants to Kigali was grounded at the last moment after the ECHR issued an “interim measure” in the case of a 53-year-old Iraqi man known only as K.N. forbidding Britain from deporting him to Rwanda.
The intervention forced Britain to abandon any similar deportations until further notice.
The High Court in London had already ruled K.N. could come back to Britain from Rwanda but the ECHR argued he faced “a real risk of irreversible harm.”
The ECHR’s intervention led to the Rwanda policy being referred up to the Supreme Court, which eventually ruled it was unlawful because the African country was not considered “safe,” forcing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to push ahead with legislation in Parliament.
Coutinho Criticised ECHR Ruling on Climate Change
Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho expressed her concern after the ECHR ruled the government of Switzerland had violated the human rights of its citizens by failing to take sufficient action to protect them against climate risks.She wrote on social media platform X: “How we tackle climate change affects our economic, energy, and national security. Elected politicians are best placed to make those decisions.”
Lord Cameron told the House of Lords he saw “no inconsistency between its policies and our membership of the Council of Europe.”
Britain was a founding member of the Council of Europe in 1949 and it has expanded over the years to include many former communist countries in Eastern Europe, the last of which to join was Montenegro in 2007.
The Council of Europe’s remit is to protect human rights, and in 2022 it expelled Russia—which had joined in 1996—following the invasion of Ukraine.
The ECHR is part of the Council of Europe and has nothing to do with the European Union, which Britain left in January 2020.
Lord Cameron told peers: “We should always keep the ECHR in proper context. Since 1975, there have been 21,784 cases and only 329 judgments against the UK, so we have relatively little incoming.”
‘It’s Dangerous When These Courts Overreach Themselves’
Lord Cameron said, “It’s dangerous when these courts overreach themselves, because ultimately we’re going to solve climate change through political will, through legislation in this House and the Commons, by the actions we take as politicians, by the arguments we put to the electorate, and so I do think there’s a danger of overreach.”Lord Clarke of Nottingham—the former Chancellor Ken Clarke—pointed out the only country to refuse to accept the jurisdiction of the ECHR was the “cruel dictatorship” of Belarus.
Lord Clarke asked for a “simple categorical assurance on the part of the present government that it will not, at any stage, contemplate just rejecting membership of the Council of Europe or rejecting the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights.”
Lord Cameron replied, “The government sees no inconsistency between its policies and our membership of the Council of Europe, and we don’t have any plans to act in the way that he [Lord Clarke] says.”
Former Home Secretary Suella Braverman called for Britain to leave the ECHR in a speech to the National Conservatism Conference in Brussels this week.
She said the European Convention on Human Rights was incompatible with parliamentary democracy and the ECHR was “profoundly undemocratic and politicised.”
Lord Cameron also said he disagreed with former Prime Minister Liz Truss, who has said the United Nations should be scrapped.
Ms. Truss told the BBC “Newscast” podcast, “At present, it has been very ineffective at dealing with international situations, in fact positively damaging, for example, on Israel.”
Lord Cameron told the House of Lords: “I take the view that the United Nations has many problems and issues, and the frustrations of dealing with the Security Council at the moment, when you’ve got a Russian veto and a Chinese veto. These frustrations are very great.”
But he added, “Good work is done through the United Nations, in spite of the frustrations, so I can see a point of the United Nations.”
