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Farage is chatting shit about his proposal to leave the ECHR

Nigel Farage is once again wasting everyone’s time. He is presenting a 10-minute bill in parliament on Britain leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

According to the Daily Mail, AKA the Daily Fail, Farage vows to ‘take back our borders’. But does he realise that the ECHR has fuck all to do with our borders?

The Daily Mail said:

The Reform UK leader told the Daily Mail that Britain’s membership of the treaty had ‘totally neutered’ the Government’s ability to deport illegal migrants.

European Convention on Human Rights

The ECHR protects our rights to:

  • life, freedom and security
  • respect for private and family life
  • freedom of expression
  • freedom of thought, conscience and religion
  • vote in and stand for election
  • a fair trial in civil and criminal matters
  • property and peaceful enjoyment of possessions.

It also prohibits:

  • the death penalty
  • torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment
  • slavery and forced labour
  • arbitrary and unlawful detention
  • discrimination in the enjoyment of the rights and freedoms secured by the Convention
  • deportation of a state’s own nationals or denying them entry and the collective deportation of foreigners.

The ECHR does not stop the UK from deporting people, apart from in exceptional circumstances.

For example, if someone will face torture when returned to their country of origin, they can challenge their removal under Article 3, Prohibition of Torture. 

What the ECHR does is set the minimum human rights standards that governments must adhere to when deporting someone.

The ECHR does not give people a right to enter or remain in a country they are not a citizen of. It also does not provide a right to claim asylum. The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has previously said that it’s up to individual states to control the entry and residence of foreign nationals. Those states have the power to deport people convicted of criminal offences.

So, as usual, Farage is chatting shit.

No-rights Nigel clearly doesn’t care about our right to life or a fair trial, or our right to freedom from torture and slavery. He’s clearly willing to give up his own right to those things, too.

But let’s face it, a white, privileged man like Farage is not going to need the ECHR in the same way that so many of us do to protect us from state violence.

All of us

You’d think from the way Farage carries on, he just wants to strip foreigners of these rights. But nope. Make no mistake, he is coming after the rights of every single one of us.

The kind of legislation the Canary can get behind:

Rule 39 orders are urgent injunctions which the ECHR can issue in ‘exceptional circumstances’ when there’s an ‘imminent risk of irreparable harm’. They are very rarely issued against the UK. This is what prevented the first deportation flights to Rwanda in 2022.

Since 1980, there have been only 29 UK cases at the ECtHR that have been related to deportation or extradition. In 16 of these, the court found that the UK did not breach the convention. The deportation or extraditions went ahead.

This means that in 45 years, the ECHR has only prevented 13 individuals from being removed from the UK.

Farage is really barking up the wrong tree. Not only is his nonsense completely racist, but he wants to waste everyone’s time and the country’s money by leaving a convention that isn’t actually doing what he says it is. Either he is completely brainless, or he thinks the rest of us are.

Once again, he is preying on people’s frustrations of years of austerity to lodge a bill which will strip everyone of their human rights.

Featured image via HG

By HG

This post was originally published on Canary.