Joint Statement by the Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ), Participation and Practice of Rights (PPR), and Human Rights Consortium on the proposal for the UK to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)
September 1, 2025The ECHR is deeply embedded within the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. An entire section of the multi-party element of the Agreement is devoted to rights protections as the foundation of a post-conflict society in Northern Ireland. The headline commitment of the United Kingdom within this section is as follows: “The British Government will complete incorporation into Northern Ireland law of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), with direct access to the courts, and remedies for breach of the Convention, including power for the courts to overrule Assembly legislation on grounds of inconsistency.” This was a direct commitment, embodied in an international agreement. It cannot be ignored, parsed or diluted to suit the policy convenience of a UK Government acting unilaterally.
This commitment does not allow the UK Government to formulate some version of what it regards as ECHR-equivalent protections. It self-evidently requires that rights protections of the ECHR itself operate in Northern Ireland as a jurisdiction. These words expressly include the application of the ECHR to the devolved institutions established under the 1998 Agreement, but it does not stop there. The commitment also applies to the activities of the UK Government and public bodies generally. These commitments were not made lightly, they were a reflection that human rights violations had been a sustaining factor in the Northern Ireland conflict and that only a set of safeguards starting from a baseline of the ECHR and not based on a statute subject to change by the UK Parliament, would have general credibility within Northern Ireland.
In 1998 the people of Northern Ireland were promised a future based on “the mutual respect, the civil rights and the religious liberties of everyone in the community”. This assertion does not make distinction based on immigration status; it applies to everyone. Withdrawal from the ECHR would inevitably diminish rights protections, leaving people across Great Britain and Northern Ireland with more restricted protections from torture and slavery, or from interferences with liberty, assembly and association, worship, free speech, property, education and elections, among other things. The restriction of international oversight of these rights protections bears the hallmarks of authoritarianism, not of a democratic society which values and respects fundamental rights. Notably the only two other countries in Europe who are now not party to the ECHR are Belarus and Russia, with Vladimir Putin to date the only leader to have withdrawn a state from the ECHR.