The Guardian view on refugee rights: a warning from history

‘Rishi Sunak’s endorsement of Suella Braverman’s strategy suggests that he, too, thinks Britain has had enough of human rights.’ Photograph: Tayfun Salcı/Zuma Press Wire/Rex/Shutterstock

Britain did not sign up to the 1951 United Nations refugee convention by accident, nor was the country bamboozled into the European convention on human rights and cooperation with the Strasbourg court that enforces the convention. It was an architect of those institutions.

The ambition was to lay solid foundations of European cooperation for the establishment of a peaceful democratic order after the second world war. Winston Churchill was a leading advocate of that project.