A Badge of Dishonour

Calls for the UK to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) have become commonplace in British political debate. Reform UK has announced withdrawal as its day one priority, the centre-right Conservative party could be on the brink of adopting exit from the ECHR as a flagship policy, and even some Labour MPs are thinking the unthinkable.

The thread connecting these positions is immigration, especially with respect to the highly salient issues of people arriving on small boats and the deportation of foreign national offenders. A dangerous point has been reached where hostility to the ECHR is seen as a “test of ideological purity” for politicians signalling their intent to control immigration, and their broader populist and authoritarian credentials – so much so that Shadow Justice Secretary (and party leadership pretender) Robert Jenrick says that Conservative parliamentary candidates should commit to leaving the Convention or stand down. These developments risk positioning the UK as an outlier on the European stage based on an entirely false prospectus. Calls for withdrawal vastly overestimate the marginal effect that the ECHR has on immigration decisions, and deny or ignore the fact that a go-it-alone approach would, in fact, hinder border control by destroying the basis for multilateral cooperation.

Mainstreaming ECHR withdrawal

What once sounded like fringe rhetoric is now being echoed at the very centre of British politics. Conservative opposition leader Kemi Badenoch, under pressure from rivals within her party, has established a commission to investigate pulling out of the ECHR and other treaties, adding, “I do believe we will likely need to leave”. One MP from the ruling Labour Party has defied party policy by calling for withdrawal from the Convention, while a few others say that no option should be “off the table”.

Reform leader Nigel Farage argues that by scrapping legal protections against mass deportation without due process, the UK would be able to expel up to 600,000 people in five years. Such claims have been comprehensively debunked and ignore the innumerable moral, political, diplomatic and operational obstacles to such an extreme scheme. Yet they are taking root in British political discourse, reinforced by an ugly and alarmist anti-immigration rhetoric.

Pushback against the ECHR and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) over immigration is neither new nor confined to the UK. What is unusual in the UK, compared to other European democracies, is the way in which calls for denunciation of the ECHR have spread beyond parties of the far-right, understood as comprising both radical right (nativist and authoritarian) and extreme right (violent, democracy-rejecting) tendencies, to adopt Mudde’s terminology.

Pressure on the Court

To be clear, calls for ECHR withdrawal are at one end of a spectrum of damaging and irresponsible state interventions which appear designed to distract from domestic political discontents and externalise responsibility for immigration matters onto the ECtHR. The touchpaper was lit by the letter from nine Council of Europe (and EU) member states published in May 2025. It calls for an “open minded conversation” about whether the ECtHR has gone “too far” in its interpretation of the ECHR in migration cases and calls for more national discretion to expel foreign national criminals and keep track of those who cannot be deported. The letter, initiated by Denmark and Italy, and signed by Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, has been criticised for being incoherent, pandering to populism, excluding categories of people from human rights protection, scapegoating or dictating to the ECtHR, and lacking understanding of the extensive discretion the Court already affords to states in its migration case law. After initial hesitation, the Secretary-General of the Council of Europe came out fighting against “politicisation” of the Court.

The letter was indeed designed to pressurise the ECtHR, but without directly addressing it or making any specific demands. Such loose talk of “reform” (echoed by UK ministers) signals an intensification of what Buyse calls the “clashing between political and judicial power at both the domestic and international  levels”. But what is striking is what the letter does not say. There is no mention of withdrawal from the ECHR or any move to revise the text of the Convention. On the contrary, the signatories “share a firm belief in our European values, the rule of law and human rights” and are “committed to a rule-based international order”.

This positioning – pushing back without pulling out – reflects the broad reality of centre-right politics around the ECHR at the national level, with calls for withdrawal hitherto confined to some far-right parties.

Pushing back, not pulling out

To start with the instigators of the letter, successive Danish governments have been a thorn in the side of the ECtHR, and Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has taken a hardline stance on immigration, outflanking parties traditionally to the right of her Social Democrats. Yet this has not extended to public consideration of withdrawal from the ECHR, and Frederiksen, in her speech to the Reykjavík summit in 2023, praised the Convention as “one of the world’s best examples of how human rights can be safeguarded”.

As for Italy, in the 2022 general election, the centre-right coalition led by Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy campaigned on a platform which contained no reference to the ECHR or ECtHR. Prime Minister Meloni has clashed with the European Court of Justice and national courts over her scheme to transfer migrants to reception centres in Albania but, at Reykjavík, reaffirmed Italy’s commitment to the Council of Europe as the basis for peaceful prosperity in Europe and a lynchpin for ensuring accountability for Russia’s aggression in Ukraine.

Signalling possible next moves, Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever made a recent intervention, speaking of a “club of migration-critical countries” led by Frederiksen, Meloni, Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and himself. De Wever ruled out any attempt to amend the Convention, since this would take too long and meet “strong headwinds”. Instead, he has written a “step-by-step plan” for an “interpretation protocol” (interpretatieprotocol) that clarifies “exactly how the ECHR should be interpreted”, which he expects to be approved by his fellow leaders in October. It is not clear whether De Wever does in fact mean a protocol to the ECHR or, more likely, an interpretive declaration or, as provided in the Committee of Ministers’ Rules of Procedure, a “statement for the record” whereby one or more states can make public their position, reservation, or interpretation on matters of their choosing.

Whatever its form, such an intervention would be a highly inappropriate encroachment on the interpretive authority of the ECtHR. Moreover, it could involve protracted inter-governmental negotiations in the absence of a European consensus on the ECHR in the migration context (recall how, in 2018, the leaked draft Copenhagen Declaration that would have undermined the ECtHR’s authority was rewritten after behind-closed-doors bargaining into a version more respectful of the Court).

As one indication of how these differences play out in the current context, when the (then) Dutch Asylum Minister Marjolein Faber from the far-right Freedom Party (PVV) asked Prime Minister Schoof to sign the letter of nine states, a row reportedly ensued within the coalition government, with the voices in the majority arguing that the ECtHR gives states ample discretion to deport foreign national offenders and that open criticism of the Court was inimical to the rule of law. Meanwhile, other governments, such as those led by Pedro Sánchez in Spain and Jonas Gahr Støre in Norway, adopt a much more positive tone on immigration and the value of the ECHR than the group of nine.

Far-right dreams and nightmares

Further right on the political spectrum, there is a mixed picture in terms of whether parties adopt the straight-to-withdrawal position of Reform UK. The PVV’s manifesto for elections in the Netherlands due in October adopts the same position as Reform UK on withdrawal from both the ECHR and the Refugee Convention. The Freedom Party in Austria (FPÖ) has questioned whether the country should stay within the ECHR. The Swiss People’s Party (SVP) has called for Switzerland to leave the ECHR, in reaction to the ECtHR’s climate judgment, but a motion to this effect was heavily defeated in both chambers of parliament.

By contrast, leaving the ECHR is not the official party policy of the Danish People’s Party (DF), although its leader, Morten Messerschmidt, voiced support for withdrawal in 2022. In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland’s manifesto for the February 2025 election, and more recent pronouncements, call for (unspecified) reform of the ECHR and the UN Refugee Convention to “adapt to current circumstances”, but not withdrawal. The latest manifesto of the French Rassemblement National does not refer to the ECHR, while under the former leadership of Marine Le Pen, the party’s platform was to control immigration without denouncing the ECHR, because this would diminish the rights of French citizens and because there was “no question” of leaving other UN and Council of Europe treaties with overlapping provisions. For its part, the Polish Law and Justice (PiS) party, while it had a deeply confrontational relationship with the ECtHR while in government, has not advocated withdrawal (although its repudiation of the Court’s authority has been described as leaving “in all but name”). In Hungary, while pro-withdrawal voices have surfaced within the right-wing coalition, this position is not officially embraced.

To highlight this lack of consensus on the question of withdrawal is not to downplay the extent to which both centre-right and far-right parties in Europe, whether in government or opposition, have become hostile to the idea of legal protection for migrants and refugees, as well as to the oversight by international institutions (recall, for example, Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention, Hungary’s exit from the International Criminal Court, and Italian leaders’ fury about a critical Council of Europe report about police racism). That far-right parties have not consistently advocated withdrawal from the ECHR, or even referred to the Convention in policy documents, also reflects the fact that much of their discourse on migration focuses on sovereignty concerns around EU law, although even here their positions are mutable and not always “hard Eurosceptic”.

Badge of dishonour

As a non-EU state, it might be expected that the UK would be an outlier among European democracies. Yet it bears repeating that it would be unprecedented for the UK Conservatives, as a centre-right party in a mature democracy, and less still for any Labour politician, to reach for the straight-to-withdrawal position. To do so would be reckless as to the consequences of pulling out of the ECHR – and hence the Council of Europe – for the people of the UK, and the severe damage that would be caused to the UK’s national interest and international reputation. Withdrawal would be a deliberate step into the present club of two – Putin’s Russia and Lukashenko’s Belarus – and away from the club of 46, the UK’s principal remaining platform for co-operation with other European states on issues such as climate change, human trafficking, corruption, cybercrime, child sexual exploitation, terrorism – and migration.

Even the contemplation of withdrawal by the UK is damaging to the Council of Europe and the rule of law. As former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown has argued, reneging on long-established obligations gives succour to authoritarian regimes, such as Turkey, Hungary and Azerbaijan. These are regimes that revel in displaying bad faith towards the ECHR system, sometimes brazenly and sometimes insidiously by, as Çalı argues, seeking to “reverse previous human rights developments and commitments without overtly rejecting the language or institutions of human rights”.

Megaphone diplomacy via open letters, and speeches talking loosely of “reform”, seek to exculpate national political actors and scapegoat the ECtHR for domestic discontent around immigration, often inflamed by the very national actors that now seek to externalise responsibility to Strasbourg. Meanwhile, the politically expedient embrace of ECHR withdrawal by UK politicians apes – and legitimises – the playbook of parties that are already far down the road of backsliding on human rights, democracy and the rule of law. Evidence demonstrates that when “mainstream” parties echo radical right rhetoric on immigration, it is the radical right that benefits. All eyes now turn to the Conservatives’ impending party conference to see if they will, nevertheless, pin this far-right “badge of honour” to their uniform.