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In the current political climate and with the increase in the intolerance of others, human rights have acquired a curious reputation. To listen to certain rightward leaning voices on the airwaves, one might conclude that they are a recent foreign invention – a bureaucratic imposition dreamed up by progressive ‘lefty’ lawyers in Strasbourg to frustrate the will of the British people. Nothing could be further from the truth. The idea that every human being possesses inherent dignity that no state may trample upon is not a creation of the twentieth century. It is, in fact, one of the oldest political ideas any civilisation has ever produced – and it is one we discard at our gravest peril.
The ancient roots of rights
The story of human rights does not begin with the European Convention. It does not begin with the Universal Declaration of 1948, nor with the Magna Carta of 1215, though each represents a crucial milestone. It begins in the ancient world, with rulers who understood, however imperfectly, that power exercised without restraint corrupts the entire society it governs.
Around 539 BCE, Cyrus the Great of Persia conquered neighbouring Babylon and issued what is widely regarded as the world’s first human rights charter. Inscribed on a clay cylinder now housed in the British Museum (in London, of all places!) the Cyrus Cylinder declared that enslaved peoples would be freed, that all peoples would be permitted to return to their homelands, and that freedom of religion would be protected throughout the empire. Cyrus understood that a diverse empire could only be held together not by the sword alone, but by a compact of dignity and freedoms. The cylinder is not merely a historical artefact. It is a statement of principle. One that notes that even the most powerful ruler is answerable to a standard higher than his own preference.
The clay cylinder of Cyrus the Great sits in the British Museum, three thousand miles and two and a half millennia from the moment it was inscribed. It is there because someone, long ago, understood that power without restraint is tyranny, and that the dignity of human beings is not a gift from rulers but a condition of legitimate governance. We have built upon that foundation ever since. We would be wise, before we tear it down, to remember why it was laid.
Earlier still, the Babylonian king Hammurabi codified a set of laws around 1754 BCE that, for all their severity, established the revolutionary principle that law should be written down and applied consistently and that the powerful could not simply do as they pleased to the weak without consequence. His contemporary Ashurbanipal, the Assyrian king who amassed one of the ancient world’s great libraries at Nineveh, was similarly preoccupied with the idea that knowledge, law, and the ordering of human affairs were sacred obligations of kingship. The preservation of learning was inseparable, in his mind, from the preservation of justice for all.
Let him who has wronged flee to my protection.
The Code of Hammurabi, c.1754 BCE
From ancient Mesopotamia and Persia, these ideas flowed directly through Greek philosophy, in the Stoic notion that all human beings share in a universal reason that confers equal dignity and, into Roman law. From Roman law they became the foundation of Western jurisprudence. The Magna Carta did not invent rights; it inscribed into English law the ancient principle that even a king must govern within limits. The Bill of Rights of 1689 extended those limits. The European Convention of 1950, drafted largely by eminent and expert British lawyers in the shadow of the Holocaust and the Gulag, gave them modern, enforceable form.
This history matters, because it exposes the absurdity of treating human rights as a foreign intrusion into British life. The ECHR is, in substantial measure, a British creation. It reflects a tradition of liberty that runs from Runnymede through Westminster to Strasbourg. To repudiate it is not to reclaim sovereignty. It is to amputate a limb of our own political heritage.
The rights that protect us all – every day
The debate over the Human Rights Act and the ECHR is almost always conducted in the language of immigration and criminal deportation. This framing, which is completely deliberate, obscures a fundamental truth. That the protections enshrined in the Human Rights Act are not primarily about migrants. They are about the relationship between every citizen and the state.
Consider what the Human Rights Act actually does for ordinary British people. Article 5 protects every person in this country against arbitrary detention. It is the legal reason the police cannot simply lock you up indefinitely without charge. Article 6 guarantees the right to a fair trial which is the cornerstone of the common law tradition, now enshrined in statute. Article 8 protects your private and family life from unlawful surveillance and interference. It is the basis on which journalists have challenged illegal phone hacking, on which families have fought wrongful separation by the state, on which individuals have resisted government overreach into their most personal affairs.
Article 10 protects freedom of expression. Article 11 protects the right to peaceful assembly and association, the legal foundation of trade unions and the right to protest. Article 14 prohibits discrimination on grounds of sex, race, religion, or political opinion. These are not the rights of illegal immigrants. They are the rights of every single person on British soil, including you, as you are reading these words.
Rights are not meaningful if they protect only the popular. A freedom that can be withdrawn at the government’s convenience is not a right at all — it is a privilege.
When we hear that the Human Rights Act should be scrapped to make deportation easier, what is actually being proposed is the removal of the domestic legal framework that makes these protections enforceable. A future British Bill of Rights, an as-yet-unwritten, undefined document, could be weakened, amended, or even removed by any parliamentary majority. The ECHR, by contrast, provides an external and necessary check and balance on state power. It is an independent court to which citizens can turn when their own government fails them. That independence is not a bug in the system. It is the entire point.
International standing and the rule of law
Britain’s reputation in the world rests on several pillars: its democratic institutions, its independent judiciary, its free press, and its historic commitment to the rule of law. These are not just sources of national pride. They are economic and diplomatic assets of enormous practical and fiscal value.
The ECHR was drafted in the aftermath of the Second World War, with the deliberate aim of preventing the kind of state barbarism that had consumed Europe. Britain was among its principal architects. Churchill himself called for the creation of a European court of human rights. To withdraw from the Convention now would be to abandon the legacy or project our own statesmen helped build, and to do so not under conditions of genuine legal necessity, but to facilitate the administrative convenience of removing certain categories of person more efficiently.
The international consequences of withdrawal would be severe. The United Kingdom would become the only liberal democracy in Europe to stand outside the Convention system. The current non-signatories are Belarus and Russia – the latter expelled following its invasion of Ukraine. This is the company into which withdrawal would place us. In trade negotiations, diplomatic relationships, and international arbitration, the reputational damage of being classified alongside authoritarian regimes as a state that has chosen to remove itself from human rights oversight would be profound, damaging and lasting.
Our close allies would take note. The United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (the nations with whom we share intelligence, military cooperation, and the deepest diplomatic ties) all operate within frameworks that recognise the ECHR as a benchmark of democratic governance. The Good Friday Agreement, which brought peace to Northern Ireland, is explicitly underwritten by both Britain and Ireland’s commitment to the Convention. Withdrawal would not merely strain that agreement. It would unravel it. The consequences for stability in Northern Ireland and for the relationship with the Republic would be incalculable.
Democracy, society and the danger of unchecked power
There is a principle at the heart of democratic governance that is easy to forget in moments of political excitement. The rights we enjoy, exist precisely to protect individuals against majorities. Democracy is not simply the rule of the mob. It is the rule of law, applied equally, with individual dignity protected against whatever popular mood happens to prevail at any given moment.
History is littered with examples of what happens when governments decide that certain categories of person do not deserve the same legal protections as others. The logic always begins with an unpopular group (criminals, foreigners, dissidents). It never ends there. Once a government has established the principle that rights are conditional, that they may be withdrawn from those it deems undeserving, it has established a tool that will inevitably be turned upon others. Trade unionists, journalists, political opponents, religious minorities, and ordinary citizens who find themselves inconvenient to those in power have all, throughout history, discovered what it means to live in a state that has discarded the principle of universal rights.
“First they came for…” is not merely a poem. It is a political alarm bell, drawn from lived catastrophe, about what happens when we accept that rights belong only to some.
The social fabric of a country and its sense of common humanity, its trust in institutions, its capacity for civic life – depends on the belief that the law treats everyone with basic dignity. A society that abandons that principle does not simply become less free for one marginalised group. It becomes less cohesive, less trusting, and less stable for everyone. The cost is borne not only by those directly stripped of protection, but by the entire community that must live in the diminished society that results.
Economic consequences and the risk of exploitation
The economic case for maintaining strong human rights protections is rarely made in these debates, but it is compelling. Businesses, investors, and international partners need confidence that the rule of law is secure, that contracts will be upheld, that workers will be protected from exploitation, that the courts are genuinely independent, and that the state operates within known and enforceable limits.
The Human Rights Act underpins employment law, data protection, and the rights of workers to organise and challenge unfair treatment. Remove those protections, and you do not merely affect migrants. You weaken the legal position of every single worker in the country, from cleaners to Managing Directors. Unscrupulous employers, exploitative landlords, and corporations that might otherwise face legal accountability for their treatment of individuals gain greater freedom to act without consequence or accountability. The beneficiaries of a weaker rights framework are rarely the ordinary citizens such rhetoric claims to champion.
There is also the question of foreign interests. Britain’s economic openness, its attractiveness to international capital, its role in global finance, its hosting of foreign investment – depends significantly on its legal reputation. A country perceived as willing to strip rights for political convenience is a country whose legal environment becomes uncertain.
Autocratic foreign states and actors who would prefer a Britain less committed to transparency, accountability, and individual liberty would welcome nothing more than the erosion of the framework that constrains arbitrary power. The fantasy that withdrawing from human rights frameworks strengthens Britain against foreign interference is completely contradictory. It weakens the legal architecture that protects British citizens, institutions, and democratic processes from exactly those threats.
Reform (ironically) NOT demolition
None of this is to say that the current operation of human rights law is perfect. There are genuine cases in which the interpretation of Convention rights has produced outcomes that strike reasonable people as disproportionate or absurd. The British courts, and ultimately Parliament, have legitimate roles in calibrating how those rights are applied in domestic law. Reform, (not the Faragist project) of the law that is thoughtful, principled, specific, is a serious conversation worth having.
But demolition is not reform. Withdrawing from the ECHR and repealing the Human Rights Act 1998, does not fix specific problems with specific cases. It removes the entire framework of enforceable rights from British law. It replaces a centuries-old tradition of liberty – one that stretches back through Churchill and Attlee and Magna Carta to Cyrus of Persia, with a promise of a future document that does not yet exist, which will offer whatever protections any future government chooses to allow, and which can be weakened or removed by a simple parliamentary vote.
That is not sovereignty. Sovereignty (genuine, meaningfully expressed) is the capacity of a free people to govern themselves under law. A government freed from the obligation to respect the rights of individuals is not more powerful on behalf of its citizens. It is more powerful against them.
