LONDON — Proponents of shaking up the European Convention on Human Rights have found an unlikely leader: Step forward, “lefty lawyer” Keir Starmer.
As a former human rights barrister, the U.K. prime minister is cut from a different cloth than the typical right-winger who rails against the Strasbourg court overseeing the 75-year-old ECHR convention.
But Starmer’s center-left Labour administration has signaled it wants to take on the job, as it faces increasing pressure both from allies and opponents to curb unauthorized migration.
Both the Conservatives and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK are angling for more radical change — but his justice secretary will stand up in Strasbourg Wednesday to make the case for reshaping the post-war treaty on human rights.
British officials told POLITICO Shabana Mahmood will raise Britain’s work on tightening the application of Article 8 on the right to a private and family life, which offenders from overseas have used to avoid deportation.
“If a foreign national commits a serious crime, they should expect to be removed from the country,” she is expected to tell ambassadors at a meeting of the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers.
“The European Convention on Human Rights is one of the great achievements of postwar politics. It has endured because it has evolved. Now, it must do so again.”
Labour MPs desperate to tackle small boat crossings of the English Channel have been increasingly demanding action on the ECHR.
“It can’t come soon enough,” a senior minister said. “We don’t want this to become the next Brexit where we ignore the issue for years and then the country votes Leave again.”
“We’re likely to go into the next election with Tories and Reform both promising to leave or hold a referendum. We need to get ahead of it,” they added.
However, the minister — granted anonymity like others in this piece to discuss internal government thinking — issued a warning based on bad memories of David Cameron bringing back insufficient concessions from the EU as prime minister, only to then lose the Brexit referendum.
“There is a risk you end up like Cameron” where you say you’re going to get reform “and you come back with not very much,” said the minister.
There are also risks that this might not go down well at the Council of Europe. Advocates of change have interpreted recent remarks in a Times interview by the organization’s head, Alain Berset, to the effect that there should be “no taboo” on discussing the rules of the organization overseeing the convention, as a sign that reform is on the cards.
But Berset told POLITICO that had not been his intention. “I am not calling for reform of the European Convention on Human Rights, nor do I support any effort that would weaken it,” he said.
“It should never be used as a scapegoat in domestic political debates. When states face complex challenges, the answer is not to dismantle the legal guardrails they themselves helped build. The proper place for dialogue is through our institutions, not through pressure on the European Court of Human Rights or attempts to bypass the system.”
It’s clear that Starmer’s administration believes updating the ECHR is the best way to save it. That approach sets them apart from some on the right who are pushing to junk it altogether — a nuclear option that critics say would throw crucial treaties into doubt.
While at times they may overlook the complicated reality, British voters have long read stories of the ECHR being used to prevent the deportation of foreign offenders. When added to the frustration that international treaties are hindering efforts to reduce Britain’s asylum appeals backlog, calls for a change in approach are broadening.
Attorney General Richard Hermer opened the door to a push for change, arguing in a May lecture that the government must be “ready to reform” international agreements such as the ECHR.
“British leadership to strengthen and reform the international rules-based system is both the right thing to do and the only truly realistic choice,” Hermer told an audience of national security experts at the RUSI think tank.
Hermer isn’t just any attorney general. He’s an old friend of Starmer’s from the legal world whom the PM installed in the House of Lords so he could serve in his Cabinet.
The speech — and Starmer’s tacit support of it — was clearly a first foray into pitch-rolling for reform.
The prime minister has made much of “smashing the gangs” to bring down boat crossings of the English Channel — but the first five months of the year have seen record arrivals, according to government stats.
Some MPs facing the most acute pressure on migration are in former Labour heartlands in the Midlands and northern England — the Red Wall in Westminster parlance.
They may be far from the southeastern landing shores for dinghies, but these seats firmly backed Brexit in 2016’s EU referendum. They then ended decades of Labour support to back the Conservatives under Boris Johnson in 2019.
Starmer tempted them back in bagging last year’s electoral landslide — but he now knows that Farage’s Reform party, riding high in the polls, is breathing down his neck with particular ferocity.
“If in 2028 we’re still talking about this we’re all going to lose our seats in the Red Wall,” as one MP put it.
While they flatly reject Farage’s call to abandon the ECHR, they advocate ignoring Strasbourg’s rulings in a bid to reduce the costly use of hotels to provide accommodation for asylum seekers while making a more permanent case for change.
Senior figures in Downing Street have also been closely reading an intervention in the Times by Jake Richards, an MP in a northern seat, and Dan Tomlinson, who represents a suburban London seat won by Labour after decades of Conservative rule.
They joined up this week to call on Starmer to join the push for change or risk relinquishing the task to the “populist right” with “devastating consequences for those who believe in the underpinning principles of human rights.”
“We know Reform and the increasingly desperate Conservatives will seek to withdraw from the convention altogether. Some of the more outlandish judgments from Strasbourg will be spun to suit this agenda. Instead, the government should offer serious and practical changes to see off this threat and deliver for the British people,” the pair wrote.
‘Big international conversations’
Britain, which helped draft the ECHR and was one of the first states to ratify it, has successfully led reform in the past. In 2012 the U.K. secured support over two principles seeking to reduce the number of cases appealed to Strasbourg.
There are various means to push for reform of the treaty, either through legal challenges or by encouraging sufficient support from the 47 member states.
Italy and Denmark led a letter to the European Court of Human Rights calling for states to be given more freedom to deport criminals from overseas. Like Starmer, France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Friedrich Merz didn’t sign it — but they too may face domestic pressure to change tack.
Starmer once shocked some in the legal world by abandoning human rights to become the country’s top prosecutor. Now campaigners have been privately making the case to No. 10 that the PM’s legal background makes him an ideal candidate to lead the charge for reform. “Like Nixon with China,” as one put it.
Jeremy Hunt, a Conservative former foreign secretary who advocates rewriting the ECHR, feels the same way.
“He won’t thank me for saying it but literally no one is better placed or more respected in legal circles to do a long overdue reform,” Hunt told POLITICO. “Far better to fight Reform with substance than empty rhetoric on ‘working people.’”
A Labour MP in a Red Wall seat added: “There aren’t many politicians in Britain who know these aspects of the legal system better than the PM. He knows this government has got to make progress and show change when it comes to controlling migration.
“He sees that and understands it — so my hope is that those two things can come together and he and this government can be part of big international conversations about this.”
On the domestic front, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has now ordered a second review into how the ECHR is interpreted, this time asking government departments to urgently examine how Article 3 on torture and degrading punishment is hindering the extradition process when it comes to claims relating to overseas prison standards. The minister quoted above conceded that Article 8 of the treaty is only a problem in a “small number” of cases, with Article 3 being cited more regularly.
‘Never a scapegoat’
They acknowledged that confronting Farage on his favorite topics could inadvertently “feed the monster” of his Reform party.
But they added: “This is already out in the open, we need to be Labour about it and shout about it.”
In reality, it will take far more than altering international treaties to reduce the global pressures that are leading to ever more asylum seekers arriving in Britain — as well as the rising political pressure to reduce their numbers.
But now Starmer will push for reform as a means to tackle both fronts.
The post ‘Lefty lawyer’ Keir Starmer to push for ECHR reform appeared first on Politico.
