“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…
Auteur: Nathan Akehurst
