Brighton Sky Blue
Well-Known Member
The conventions were set up when millions of people were displaced, most of Europe was in ruins and folks often had nothing more to present than their clothes, never mind documentation or being able to offer proof of identity. I find this dehumanising of desperate people to be more than a bit distasteful anyway, and is just one addition to the list of reasons why we'd be leaving the country if we could.Why can’t they?
English common law is the basis of the free world. Canada, Australia, NZ do not need to be a part of the ECHR. Australia, by the way, had a similar issue with small boats from Indonesia and provide the blueprint for us to follow. On the Human Rights Act, it enshrines the primacy of the ECHR over British law and that is fundamentally wrong. There’s no reason why a British Bill of Rights could be used to replace the HRA. After all, the Bill of Rights (1689) is still active on the statute books so this idea that we had no human rights before the HRA of 1998 is demonstrably false.
Again, these conventions were set up in response to specific circumstances post-WW2 and clearly is not equipped with millions of people coming to Europe’s doors.
For example, take the 1951 refugee convention:
- no ‘first country’ obligation wasn’t envisaged with people travelling cross-continent to claim asylum. A practical reform could be to amend it to apply in the continent of origin
- ‘Protection for illegal entry’ - again, makes sense in the context of the Cold War. Not so much when you have people from Afghanistan or Eritrea who cross tens of safe countries and pay traffickers to go to the EU, travel through multiple EU countries and then pay traffickers to get to the UK.
If these conventions cannot be reformed to adjust to modern realities… at the v least they ought to be suspended temporarily.
Flipping off the EU and now flipping off international law so that we can flip off people seeking refuge here, it's disgraceful. Asylum seekers are not the reason why the country's in the state that it is.