Weakening Migrants’ Rights in the Name of Fighting Racism
Keir Starmer wants to weaken the European Convention on Human Rights, hoping that this will win back voters from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. In the name of fighting right-wing politics, he’s handing more powers to a future Farage-led government.
Keir Starmer’s Britain is attempting to position itself at the helm of a new multilateral regime of transnational policing, globalized migration controls, and rearmament. (Alastair Grant / POOL / AFP via Getty Images)
“What Europe is doing with immigration is a disaster,” US president Donald Trump told Politico’s Dasha Burns in an incendiary interview published on December 9. “They’re decaying. They’re destroying their countries.”
Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, agrees. As Trump’s newest broadside rocked Europe, Starmer and Danish premier Mette Frederiksen launched an intervention in the Guardian, calling for sweeping changes to the established European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) to speed up deportation rates. Both nominally on the center left of politics, they are leading a cross-European bid to push the Council of Europe, which oversees the ECHR, to make these changes.
Unity between British centrists and US conservatives in undermining international laws and norms is nothing new. We’d seen it already during the global “war on terror” or the Gaza genocide. On both sides of the Atlantic, governments have long dropped the pretense of abiding moral and legal norms on migration.
The pace of this shift is nevertheless surprising. Until recently, calls to amend or drop the ECHR had been confined to right-wing hard-liners. Now Starmer has taken them mainstream. He frames this as a response to ordinary people’s concerns. It seems doubtful that amid a crippling cost-of-living crisis, such European jurisprudence is dominating many people’s kitchen-table discussions.
Look closer and the substance of the argument gets odder. If one believes Britain’s hysterical tabloid press, the ECHR is a cudgel wielded by activist lawyers to frustrate any attempt to deport even the most violent foreign criminals. In August, a national furor broke out over a claim that an offender could not be deported because of his son’s human right to eat his favorite brand of chicken nuggets, only available on British shelves.
Nuggetgate was not true, and neither was the narrative behind it. Less than one in every hundred foreign-national convicts succeeds in appealing a deportation decision. Around one in sixty cases of people who claim that their rights under the ECHR have been violated have anything to do with immigration. In the last forty-five years, the ECHR has ruled against the British state in only thirteen immigration removal cases. The country’s immigration rules have been found in violation of the ECHR on just three occasions.
The ECHR does provide some protections used in immigration cases. But that’s not why conservatives hate it. It is just the latest target for their standard playbook. The attack on a minority (in this case asylum seekers) provides an excuse to roll back everyone’s legal protections.
British right-wingers cast the ECHR as a tool of elites, but they hate it for its intermittent ability to restrain elite power. Rulings have helped workers avoid being penalized for joining unions, restrained police forces from using mass surveillance, and taken steps toward leveling the playing field between large corporations and ordinary claimants in court.
It’s unsurprising that the Right works to undermine human rights. A more interesting question is: What’s in it for the Labour Party?
A New Era
“The current asylum framework was created for another era,” opens Starmer and Frederiksen’s article. “In a world with mass mobility, yesterday’s answers do not work.”
The context surely has changed — albeit in the opposite way to what these narrators imply. When the Refugee Convention and ECHR were written, up to sixty-five million people had been displaced across Europe after World War II. Today’s total is barely a sixth of that, with the largest group being those displaced from Ukraine in 2022. While contemporary Europe certainly has its problems, most of its major cities are no longer smoldering piles of rubble.
This deeply misleading start sets the tone for Starmer and Frederiksen’s loose relationship with facts and coherence throughout. The point of their intervention is to announce proposals to the ECHR, but they don’t deign to mention this until the final paragraphs.
While claiming they want to focus on faster removals of foreign criminals, they also point to a desire to make life harder for refugees across the board. Their first proposed change is intended to prevent migrants from reuniting with their families in Britain, through a reinterpretation of the meaning of a right to a family life.
The second thing Starmer and his allies find objectionable is how the ECHR’s judges have interpreted the right to freedom from torture in migration cases. This precedent is rooted in a 1988 ruling (not a migration case), which prevented a murder suspect from being extradited to the United States due to that country’s use of the death penalty.
It is unclear whether Starmer wants weaker definitions of freedom from torture and family life rights for everyone. Maybe he wants to stop at creating a category of second-class citizens among asylum seekers — though this also undermines the point of universal human rights. In practice, the point regarding torture seems likely related to Europe’s current major push to deport more people to Afghanistan, even under Taliban rule.
Authoritarians
Starmer is working with Frederiksen for a reason. Denmark is perhaps the sole example of a European country where Social Democrats have introduced harsh migration policy in office and retained power. In other countries, such concessions to right-wing claims have been rewarded by electoral defeat.
Denmark is a small, relatively tight-knit country with little imperial history, low migration levels, and higher wealth equality. For these reasons and more, conditions there do not map well onto Britain. And even in Denmark, the Social Democrats’ drift rightward was recently a key factor in their losing the capital city of Copenhagen for the first time in a century to the Left.
The surface-level politics of the ECHR move are about panicked Labour strategists inventing incoherent schemes to neutralize the meteoric rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. But this is not all that’s going on.
Internationally, Starmer’s Britain is attempting to position itself at the helm of a new multilateral regime of transnational policing, globalized migration controls, and rearmament, replacing the liberal universalism of structures like the ECHR with cross-border authoritarianism.
This is mirrored by Labour’s striking descent into authoritarian domestic policy, even relative to its Conservative predecessor.
The most notable example is the declaration of protest group Palestine Action as a terrorist organization, a move extreme enough to be decried even by a former Royal Air Force officer once charged with securing nuclear bases against mass protests.
The Palestine Action ban and harsh treatment of climate protesters can also be somewhat read as appeasement of Britain’s right. But the same does not apply to Labour’s deeply unpopular proposals to introduce compulsory digital ID, which is moving ahead despite a backlash across the political spectrum. The Right also has its own account of the civil liberties critique, mainly in opposition to draconian sentences for incendiary social media posts. In short, no one is buying what Starmer is selling.
It is Labour, not the Right, that is currently using claims of crime, domestic extremism, and migration crisis to roll back civil liberties at scale.
To do so, they are diverting already strained public resources into this authoritarian project. Controversial US tech and weapons firm Anduril has been brought in to blanket the South Coast in high-tech watchtowers, as part of billions in funding set aside for controlling Channel migration. The close access to government and public services enjoyed by Palantir and other Big Tech actors is facing increasing scrutiny. So too is Britain’s association with violent border controls overseas and arms exports to wars of aggression.
In the context of this wider authoritarian drive, the rationale behind undermining frameworks like the ECHR, which provide checks on state power, becomes clearer.
Mr Rules?
There is an obvious irony in Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, leading a global charge to weaken human rights. There are also precedents for Starmer’s authoritarian shift in office, including his push when he was Britain’s prosecutions chief for harsh sentences over relatively low-level offences.
His team has squared these contradictions by portraying him as “Mr Rules,” a technocrat who is passionate about ensuring things are done properly, which may result in different outcomes at different times.
But the ECHR move, and the wider shift it symbolizes, is not upholding a rules-based order so much as dismantling it.
Like the Palestine Action ban, or the various ill-considered changes to asylum rules, the attempt to reinterpret the ECHR creates a more chaotic, less rule-bound system that is more amenable to abuses of power. Its underlying logic, by which politicians not only draft laws but dictate their interpretation by the courts, has dangerous implications.
It’s hardly just activist lawyers sounding the alarm. Even the House of Lords’ Constitution Committee now thinks that the rule of law is under threat.
Amending the ECHR will hardly revolutionize British migration policy, as the Law Society points out. ECHR members including Greece, Turkey, Poland, and Italy have managed to commit or sponsor extreme and large-scale human rights violations against people migrating while hanging on to their membership cards. But it sends a powerful signal that even apparently established norms can now be rewritten.
Britain’s political class is painfully aware of a vacuum of public trust in politics and eroded popular consent for their rule. In Britain and across Europe, the center’s twofold response has been ideological concessions to the radical right, while building their own machinery to manage crisis by controlling dissent.
Labour’s case to its supporters is that they should give it room to maneuver, because while it might make people uncomfortable, the alternative is Reform. The approach doesn’t work, but the argument also misses the point.
Reform UK would be far more aggressive in reshaping society for the worse. By normalizing its talking points and creating new legal infrastructure for it to use, Starmer is simply clearing the road for reaction. It’s making his opponents’ lives easier.
The prime minister is giving the British state new weapons. He should be more concerned about where they might be pointed.