Far from being settled, after Brexit the debates around the place of the UK in Europe continue to be a central aspect of British politics. They remain so ahead of the 2024 general election. The question of the application in the UK of the European Convention on Human Rights seems to be a central point of contention amongst political parties.

This post analyses the 2024 manifestos of the main British parties on this matter from a comparative perspective. The focus is on the manifestos of those political parties with more sceptical and critical approaches to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and its Court (ECtHR). My aim is two-fold. On the one hand, I want to analyse the framings and arguments that parties such as the Conservative Party and Reform UK use when questioning the ECHR or the ECtHR. On the other hand, I want to scrutinize how British debates on this subject compare to those of some other European countries that have recently had elections and in which some relevant parties are Eurosceptic.

The ECtHR in British political party manifestos

This section analyses the coverage of the ECHR and its Court in the election manifestos of the Labour Party, Conservative Party and Reform UK. These parties have been selected as, according to current polls, they will likely achieve the most votes in the upcoming election. Interestingly enough, all of these political parties address the issue of the British relation with the European Convention on Human Rights in their manifestos. 

In its manifesto (p.119) Labour promises that ‘Britain will unequivocally remain a member of the European Convention on Human Rights’. The wording in the Labour Party manifesto is brief but assertive on this point, and the pledge is included in a section entitled ‘Rebuilding Relationships’, that outlines the more general European and international policy of the party.

On the other side of the political spectrum the approach is however much more sceptical. The Conservative Party manifesto also mentions the European Court of Human Rights. But it does so in relation to its anti-immigration policies, and to suggest that a Conservative Government would not apply ECtHR rulings in certain circumstances:

 ‘We will run a relentless, continual process of permanently removing illegal migrants to Rwanda with a regular rhythm of flights every month, starting this July, until the boats are stopped. If we are forced to choose between our security and the jurisdiction of a foreign court, including the ECtHR, we will always choose our security’ (p.36). 

The Conservative manifesto does not say here what mechanism it might establish to do this, and whether this would involve abandoning the ECHR altogether. However, while light on details, the thrust of the proposals regarding the ECtHR is highly sceptical, framing the court as a ‘foreign court’, a posture which can be characterised as a form of ‘judicial nationalism. 

Reform UK is more explicit on the topic of the ECHR. Their manifesto promises (twice) to ‘leave the European Convention on Human Rights’. First, in connection with the migration issue: ‘Leave the European Convention on Human Rights. Zero illegal immigrants to be resettled in the UK. New Department of Immigration. Pick up illegal migrants out of boats and take them back to France’ (p.3). Secondly, in relation to a general law and order narrative: ‘Leave the European Convention on Human Rights. Commence reform of the Human Rights Act so that it puts the rights of law-abiding people first’ (p.21). The party also promises the creation of a British Bill of Rights (p.21).

The controversy around the ECtHR is not new in the UK. In a recent academic article I explain how there has been a discussion about this in the manifestos of right-wing parties in Europe (including the British Conservative Party and UKIP) in previous elections, selectively mobilizing elements of constitutional theory and putting them at the service of Eurosceptic narratives.

A comparative analysis

To give some more perspective on the proposals and framings of the Conservatives and Reform UK about the ECHR it is helpful to adopt a comparative approach. In this section, I analyse these manifestos in comparison with those of other right-wing parties in Italy (2022 political election) and Spain (2023 general election). The fact that these were recent first-order elections in countries that are also members of the European Court of Human Rights makes the comparison more useful. 

	Party	Framings	Type of reference
UK General Election 2024	Conservative and Unionist Party	Judicial nationalismAnti-immigration	Explicit and negative
	Reform UK	Anti-immigrationLaw and order	Explicit and negative
Italian Political Election 2022	Centre-right coalition	Commitment to European Integration	Implicit and positive
Spanish General Election 2023	Partido Popular	Commitment to international rules-based order	Implicit and positive
	Vox	Judicial and constitutional nationalism	Implicit and negative

In Italy, in the 2022 election the so-called ‘Centre-right coalition’ grouped Eurosceptic parties, such as Lega and Fratelli d’Italia, together with other more moderate parties like Forza Italia. The parties agreed and campaigned on a common programme for government, and thus this is the document that I will be analysing in this post. The programme contained no significant references to the ECHR or its Court, but there is a general commitment of ‘full adhesion to the process of European integration’, even if this seemed to refer more specifically to the European Union. Thus, the scepticism about the ECtHR in the manifestos of British Conservatives and Reform UK was not paralleled by Italian right-wing parties in their most recent election. This is the case even if some of the members of the coalition have traditionally articulated clearly Eurosceptic narratives and proposals, albeit usually targeted to the EU: for instance, ahead of the Italian 2018 election, Salvini’s Lega contraposed the Italian Constitutional Court to the European Union, questioning the principle of primacy of EU law.

In Spain, the most recent general election took place in 2023. In this election, the radical party Vox did not explicitly refer to the ECHR or the ECtHR, although its Electoral Programme included a large list of clearly Eurosceptic proposals (pp.133 ff). The most significant were the pledges to ‘defend the primacy of the Spanish Constitution over European law’and the promise to ‘recover the national sovereignty in the application of rulings of our courts’. These are two very ambiguous proposals, but in one potential reading they might be pointing at the possibility of ignoring the decisions of the Strasbourg court. In comparative terms, Vox’s manifesto was less explicit than the 2024 Conservative Party manifesto in its rejection of the ECtHR, as the court is not openly mentioned by Vox. However, Vox’s proposals had a similar potential to undermine the relationship of Spain with the Court. Because Vox does not pledge to abandon the Court straightaway, its proposals on this point are probably softer than those of Reform UK.

Additionally, the largest right-wing party in Spain, the conservative Partido Popular, did not mention the ECHR or the Court in their manifesto either. The only potential (positive) mention is an implicit reference to ‘the United Nations and other international organisms’ in which they pledge to ‘reinforce the commitment with fair, rules-based international order, with efficient multilateral institutions’ (p.99). Thus, for this party, Spanish membership of the ECHR seems to be a non-issue, the party being openly committed to general European integration.

Discussion

This post has analysed Eurosceptic takes on the ECHR and the ECtHR in British political party manifestos from a comparative perspective. Following this, there are three main takeaways.

First, the framings and proposals of the Conservatives and Reform UK are, in general, comparatively more radical than the takes on the court of parties from the other countries covered. Only the Spanish radical right party Vox has positions that seem equivalent to those of these British parties. In Italy, the right-wing coalition programme of government did not make an issue of Italy’s membership of the Council of Europe, despite the fact that some of its party members are notoriously Eurosceptic. 

Second, the framings in manifestos matter, because they provide an analytical context to assess the pledges against the ECHR. The British Conservatives engaged in a process of ‘othering’ of the European Court of Human Rights to justify lack of compliance with its decisions. By calling it a ‘foreign’ court the ECtHR is presented as an alien institution meddling in internal British affairs. This framing, however, is not new, and it has been used for instance by Catalan pro-independence actors to refer to the Spanish Constitutional Court. In the case of Reform UK, the framing links the ECHR to anti-immigration and to law-and-order narratives, and abandoning the Convention is presented as a necessary condition to implement hard policies in this area.

Finally, sceptical narratives on the ECtHR seem to replicate the same Brexit trap of ‘take back control’. The ECHR-sceptic approaches described in this post seem to suggest that the UK should be deciding unilaterally on these matters. But there is a trade-off to this: by deciding unilaterally, the UK would preclude cooperation with other countries that are its co-equals, in this case cooperation in the area of human rights protection. This trade-off between unilateral decision-making and cooperation is not transparently discussed by those who favour isolationist approaches.

Conclusion

Several years after the British exit from the EU the debate about the political place of the UK in the continent is far from settled. 

At the moment of writing this post polls predict a victory for the Labour Party in the election. This would minimize the chances of changes undermining the relationship of the UK with the ECHR. Yet, both Conservatives and Reform UK are campaigning on manifestos that seek to question this relationship. This points at this issue having the potential to polarize British politics in years to come, to an extent that is not paralleled in many other European countries.

I want to thank Giuseppe Martinico, Giacomo Delledonne, as well as the editors of the UKCLA blog for very helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this post.

Dr Pablo Castillo-Ortiz, Senior Lecturer at the School of Law, University of Sheffield

(Suggested citation: P. Castillo-Ortiz, ‘A Foreign Court’: ECHR-scepticism in Comparative Perspective’, U.K. Const. L. Blog (25th June 2024) (available at https://ukconstitutionallaw.org/))