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What Suella Braverman’s plan for quitting the ECHR gets right

10 1
21.07.2025

This morning’s paper on leaving the ECHR from Suella Braverman and the Prosperity Institute doesn’t say much that hasn’t been said somewhere before. It reiterates the fairly obvious political case for a UK ECHR exit.

It talks about the erosion of sovereignty over immigration, policing and vast swathes of social policy; the baneful ‘living instrument’ doctrine that means we have now effectively given a blank cheque to a self-selecting and unaccountable bench to second-guess our democratic process in ever more intrusive ways; the Strasbourg court’s arrogation of powers, such as the right to order interim measures never contemplated in 1950; and so on. The paper then goes in detail through the legal machinery of disentanglement, starting with the obvious point that the Convention itself provides for a right to leave on giving six months’ notice, and then describing the legislative and administrative processes involved. 

Whisper it quietly, but human rights scepticism is becoming the new mainstream

But don’t be fooled. This may not be exciting reading (Suella is, after all, a lawyer); but the appearance of this document at this time matters a lot.

One very significant point is that the paper in one place........

© The Spectator