Boris Johnson faces growing pressure from his ruling party to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, amid frustration that a court ruling scuppered the government’s flagship immigration plan this week.
Veteran Tory MP Edward Leigh became the latest to suggest the U.K. withdraw from the convention, after a court in Strasbourg — which enforces the ECHR — halted the first planned deportation to Rwanda.
“It may be eventually necessary to get out of the Convention,” Leigh told Bloomberg’s Emily Ashton on BBC Radio 4’s “The Week in Westminster” program on Saturday, when asked about the aborted flight. “The government is absolutely determined, we will go back and we will get this policy through.”
Though the chaotic scenes on Tuesday were a setback for Johnson’s policy, they also allowed the prime minister and the Conservatives to present themselves as being tough on immigration but thwarted by a court in Europe — both themes the party sees as playing well with its base.
Johnson also brushed back criticism of a new 12-month pilot program to put electronic tags on some asylum seekers to track their movements once they arrive in the U.K. We are “making sure that asylum seekers can’t just vanish into the rest of the country,” he said Saturday, Sky News reported.
Leigh said the right approach was with “diplomacy and negotiation,” to make clear to the European judges that there had been “proper due process” in the British courts and that “people’s human rights are not infringed.”
He said the policy to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda is the only way to prevent people trying to make the dangerous crossing from France. Rwanda “is a safe country, much safer than crossing the Channel,” he said.
Labour MP Fleur Anderson called the Tory focus on the EHCR a distraction, and said the Rwanda plan is “unworkable, unethical and very, very expensive.”
