\n<\/p>\n
T<\/span>he battle had been brewing for months. But this week it came to a head in a flurry of meetings, calls and one heady statement. Twenty-seven European countries urged a rethink of the human rights laws forged after the second world war, describing them as <\/strong>an impediment when it came to addressing migration.<\/p>\n Amnesty International has called it \u201ca moral retreat\u201d. Europe\u2019s most senior human rights official said the approach risked creating a \u201chierarchy of people\u201d where some are seen as more deserving of protection than others.<\/p>\n The roots of the clash can be traced back to May, when nine EU states, including Denmark, Italy and Poland, published a letter arguing that the European convention on human rights was hindering their ability to exert sovereignty over their states and deport people who committed crimes. \u201cWe have to restore the right balance,\u201d the letter noted. \u201cWhat was once right might not be the answer of tomorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n This week 27 countries shared these grievances, though several, including France, Spain and Germany, declined to sign the letter, hinting at a divide in how states view the convention.<\/p>\n Speaking to the Guardian this week, Europe\u2019s top human rights official hit out at politicians\u2019 \u201clazy language\u201d, laced with assumptions and inaccuracies, which led countries to erroneously target human rights legislation.<\/p>\n One example was the \u201clazy correlation\u201d of migration and crime, said Michael O\u2019Flaherty, the Council of Europe\u2019s commissioner for human rights. \u201cThis doesn\u2019t correspond with reality,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Even so, this distorted perception had been widely peddled. \u201cWhat\u2019s at issue is this feeding into the misunderstanding in society that we\u2019re opening the door to criminals to run amok in our societies doing untold damage,\u201d he said. \u201cNo wonder people get frightened, no wonder people are demanding limits on migration.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>Why does Starmer want to weaken human rights? | The Latest<\/span><\/p>\n Politicians from across the spectrum were to blame, he said. \u201cWhat happens is middle-of-the-road politicians use this lazy language, but then it\u2019s instrumentalised by those who would actively promote disinformation.\u201d<\/p>\n He pointed to the UK, where tremendous attention had been given to court cases where the convention on human rights had stymied the expulsion of criminals. \u201cAnd again here, the figures simply don\u2019t correspond with that,\u201d said O\u2019Flaherty. \u201cThe figure is tiny, and it\u2019s completely manageable in any modern rule of law state. And very few of these cases ever reach the European court of human rights because there are all those checks and balances at the national level that kick in first.\u201d<\/p>\n His view was backed by a report, published this week by the University of Oxford, which found that media reporting in the UK was \u201cdominated by often inaccurate or misleading reports\u201d when it came to the impact of the convention on immigration control.<\/p>\n The report also highlighted the many ways in which the convention, whose first signatory was the UK when it launched 75 years ago, safeguards people in workplaces, hospitals and care homes and protects victims of domestic violence and modern slavery.<\/p>\n The history of the convention traces back to the aftermath of the second world war when countries came together to launch the Council of Europe, envisioning it as a guardian of fundamental rights across the continent. These rights were enshrined in the European convention on human rights, a document that has since been signed by 46 countries.<\/p>\n O\u2019Flaherty said he saw no need for the convention to now be modernised, warning that the call by politicians risked creating a \u201cfalse expectation\u201d among voters. \u201cIs that really going to change migratory flows?\u201d he asked. \u201cIs that going to stop people from crossing the Channel? Is that going to ruin the business model of the migrant smugglers? I don\u2019t think so.\u201d<\/p>\n He also pushed back against the assertion that the convention impeded on states\u2019 sovereignty. Individuals and countries could only make an application to the European court after they had exhausted domestic options, he noted, while the European court of human rights is made up of judges representing every member state. \u201cThis is not a bunch of foreign judges imposing something on us,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Writing in the Guardian this week, the UK\u2019s prime minister, Keir Starmer, and his Danish counterpart, Mette Frederiksen, argued that an update of the convention on human rights was needed to help see off the rise of the populist right.<\/p>\n O\u2019Flaherty rejected the link. \u201cFor every inch yielded, there\u2019s going to be another inch demanded,\u201d he said. \u201cWhere does it stop? For example, the focus right now is on migrants, in large part. But who is it going to be about next time around? What happens when another small vulnerable, weak, marginalised group catches the eye of some populist schemers?\u201d<\/p>\n Yielding ground on human rights would ultimately serve the interest of these populists by weakening the rule of law, he said, and risk creating a \u201chierarchy of people\u201d, a notion he described as \u201cvery, very worrying\u201d given the convention\u2019s roots in the horrors of the second world war.<\/p>\n He said: \u201cThe convention and the whole human rights system emerged out of the most barbarous hierarchisation of rights holders that you could imagine, where you had not only some humans more worthy than others, but certain humans, because of their origin, as having no value whatsoever.<\/p>\n \u201cA universal system of human rights was built, strategically built, to make sure that we could never end up in that nightmare scenario again,\u201d O\u2019Flaherty added. \u201cWe\u2019re not there now, of course we\u2019re not. But we have to be very cautious and careful about the ultimate consequences, albeit unintended, of the paths we might embark on.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The battle had been brewing for months. But this week it came to a head in a flurry of meetings, calls and one heady statement. Twenty-seven European countries urged a rethink of the human rights laws forged after the second world war, describing them as an impediment when it came to addressing migration. Amnesty International<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":37207,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[160,3375,715,320,761,2985,4964,12858,702,286,5564],"class_list":{"0":"post-37206","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-crime-justice","8":"tag-court","9":"tag-echr","10":"tag-european","11":"tag-experts","12":"tag-human","13":"tag-moral","14":"tag-rethink","15":"tag-retreat","16":"tag-rights","17":"tag-time","18":"tag-whos"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37206\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/37207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}