Council of Europe and the European Convention on Human Rights

Debate between Cat Eccles and David Mundell

Wednesday 5th November 2025 Westminster Hall

[David Mundell (in the Chair)]

The debate may continue until 6.30 pm.

[Cat Eccles]

My hon. Friend the Member for Jarrow and Gateshead East (Kate Osborne) is one of the longest-serving delegates. She sits on the Committee on Equality and Non-Discrimination, fighting for gender equality, combating violence against women and girls and defending the rights of the LGBTQ+ community. She is a rapporteur for the committee and has overseen a report on the ban of so-called conversion practices, which will hopefully be passed at the next plenary in January. That report will provide model legislation for all 46 member states to pass and end that awful practice. Let us hope that this House is ready to enact those recommendations, as promised in our manifesto and the King’s Speech. As a member of the Committee on Culture, Science, Education and Media, I have worked with colleagues on youth democracy, artificial intelligence, ethics in sport and media freedom.

The Council of Europe develops recommendations on issues affecting all member states, including the UK. We may be an island, but sharing best practice and developing common conventions strengthens rights, freedoms and democratic values across the continent. The Council of Europe continues to lead globally, abolishing the death penalty in Europe, supporting democratic transitions and exposing human rights abuses. It expelled Russia from the Council, declaring it a terrorist state, and Belarus for its support for Russian aggression. This summer, I witnessed history being made in Strasbourg as President Zelensky signed a bilateral agreement with the Council of Europe to bring a trial against Russia for crimes of aggression against Ukraine.

But what has the ECHR ever done for us? Well, it has ensured that the Good Friday agreement has lasted this long. The incorporation of the ECHR into Northern Irish law means that the people of Northern Ireland have an independent arbiter to trust in disputes over fault during the troubles, and that is no small thing. It is vital to peace, societal rebuilding and the end of sectarianism. Maintained rights can create faith in people and shine light out of darkness.

--- Later in debate ---

[Cat Eccles]

My hon. Friend has made a really important point. The convention covers so many parts of our life and we must maintain it.

Currently, our politics is consumed by the issue of small boats. Despite representing less than 2% of all immigration into the UK, the boats are suddenly the reason why we must abandon the convention and place our collective human rights at the mercy of Government. In many ways, the attempted attacks on our freedoms under the guise of liberation remind me of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”. They say that truth is stranger than fiction, but I do not want to find myself looking from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again, and finding that I cannot tell which is which.

Of course, even the conflation of small boat arrivals with the ECHR is a lie. Mr Mundell, did you know that the ECHR has nothing written down relating to immigration or asylum? There is no right to asylum in the ECHR. Did you also know that, since the Human Rights Act 1998, the European Court’s rulings against the UK have fallen dramatically? It used to average 17 a year; now it is fewer than four. Indeed, it ruled against the UK only once in 2024—when, in a very nice piece of irony, the ECHR protected the rights of the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday to freedom of expression. Even the convention’s harshest critics come running to it for protection when they are under threat from big government.

The University of Oxford recently published a Bonavero report titled “The European Convention on Human Rights and Immigration Control in the UK: Informing the Public Debate”, which centres on misinformation, over-reporting and outright lies in the press that poison the debate around the ECHR. I highly recommend it to all Members who are wavering on whether the UK should stay in the convention or leave it because of immigration.

There are two articles of the ECHR that have been tied to immigration. Article 3 is applied so that we do not send individuals back to torture or death—I would like to believe that we can all agree on that. Article 8, the right to family life, is projected by the ECHR’s critics as the real villain of the piece. They argue that it stops deportations of foreign criminals, sex offenders and individuals who arrived in the UK via small boats. There really is a lot of rubbish written in the papers and online relating to article 8, using examples of how the ECHR is being used to stop deportations and erode national security and identity.

The most notorious example was in February this year, when an Albanian criminal was apparently granted appeal to deportation because his son would not eat foreign chicken nuggets. The ruling was made because the criminal’s younger child had sensory issues, food sensitivities and emotional difficulties, but the upper tribunal rejected the appeal as not strong enough to be considered unduly harsh, and the case is still under review. For the record, article 8 is primarily used for reunification of British citizens with family members who are foreign nationals.

Let us step away from that story and look at some statistics. From 2015 to 2021, the Home Office removed 31,400 foreign national offenders from the UK, and in that period 1,000 foreign criminals managed to halt deportation on ECHR grounds, roughly 3% of the overall figure. Less than 1% of those cases were ultimately successful, so the ECHR is hardly the immovable object blocking the UK’s will in removing offenders from its shores.

Furthermore, the Court has ruled only three times that the UK’s immigration rules have violated the ECHR in the past 45 years, but political and media pressure appears to be bearing down on our relationship with the ECHR. There have been noises about tweaking the convention and about opening discussions, the thought of which fills me with dread.

Why concede the argument that the ECHR is to blame for our impotence, when that squarely does not match the reality? Why put the EHCR directly in the limelight of the political will of the day? Why cost businesses an estimated £1.6 billion at a time when they are already struggling? Why abandon the soft power that our place in the convention and institution affords us?

If I may say so, this reminds me of David Cameron’s renegotiation with the EU prior to the referendum. He put Britain’s relationship with the EU at the forefront of the agenda and worked tirelessly to get a better deal for Britain, believing that if he could show that Britain can renegotiate, the crocodiles in his party and on the fringes would let up—but in the end he lost it all. I make a plea to the Minister and to the Government: “Let’s draw a line in the sand. Stand up and fight for the convention and our place in it. Do not concede. Do not think that you can find a middle course that will satisfy all parties and stem the anti-politics sentiment that is so prevalent in the UK today. Let’s be bold and argue for the UK’s role in the Council of Europe and the ECHR.”

[David Mundell (in the Chair)]

I call Paul Kohler. You have three minutes.