Yes — we need to leave the ECHR. Here’s how.
If you really want to stop the chaos here’s what we need to do
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This is a guest post by Guy Dampier, Senior Researcher at Prosperity Institute …
Just this week we heard about a 19-year-old with learning disabilities who was sexually assaulted by a small boat migrant while on her way to a food bank.
We’ve also seen protests in leafy Epping after a 14 year-old girl was attacked. And now we’ve heard that another woman has been raped in Ashfield.
What all of these have in common is that the attackers were asylum-seekers living in nearby asylum hotels, their bed and food paid for by you, the taxpayer, so that these illegal migrants could attack your children.
The reason why we are funding these foreign rapists to live among us at our expense is the European Convention on Human Rights.
Written in the 1950s, it was intended to prevent a repeat of the Second World War, and to protect against Communist totalitarianism. That was a noble aim.
But in the hands of the unelected judges who are in charge of interpreting the Convention, it has become a charter for foreign rapists and criminals.
In the last 50 years, the judges have changed the very meaning of the original text so that it can fit modern left-wing views, calling this the “living instrument” doctrine.
We have no means to prevent this.
The judges at the court in Strasbourg, just opposite the EU Parliament, are unelected, their judgements are mandatory, and many of the decisions they make are done anonymously.
The Rwanda plan to send illegal immigrants to the African country was shut down by a judge whose name and nationality we still do not know.
This is why Suella Braverman MP and myself have written a new paper for the Prosperity Institute, which doesn’t just say why we should leave the Convention but also exactly how we can do so.
This is the most detailed plan yet.
It is absurd that in a democracy we find the law being effectively made not by elected politicians but by judges who we do not know and over whom we have no democratic control.
There is no way to change this either.
Under David Cameron, the Conservative party spent a decade trying to reform the Convention.
They had the perfect opportunity, with other countries similarly angry and Britain leading the Council of Europe.
Despite this, a decade on from the Brighton Declaration, which was the result of their reforming plans, and all the same problems persist.
Some people have suggested that we could replace the ECHR with a British Bill of Rights.
This has an obvious attraction but would create the same problems, with unelected judges likely to use it to constrain Parliamentary sovereignty.
You only have to look at New Zealand in the 1990s, where a Bill of Rights that was designed to avoid exactly these problems was quickly subverted by judicial activism.
That’s why the only option is to leave. And it really isn’t terribly complicated.
Here is what we need to do. If you really care about turning Britain around then you need to read this …
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