Suella Braverman: My new paper offers a practical path to leaving the ECHR

Suella Braverman is MP for Fareham and Waterlooville, and a former home secretary.

By any measure, ConservativeHome has always been more than a spectator in the theatre of Tory politics. It is often its conscience, and sometimes, its compass. If you want to understand where the base is heading, look at the comment threads. And if you want to see where the leadership might soon follow, look at the polls on this site, not in the Sunday papers.

Nowhere has this been clearer than on the issue of the European Convention on Human Rights. For years, readers here have shown steady resolve – if not impatience – at the continued subjugation of our border policy to Strasbourg diktats. Long before Rwanda became a totemic struggle for sovereignty, many here had already reached the obvious conclusion: that no immigration policy worth its salt can survive while a supranational court retains a veto over its implementation.

I reached that point in 2022. As Attorney General, watching those Rwanda flights grounded – by a last-minute injunction, from a foreign court to which no British citizen can elect their own judge – was a crystallising moment. I said then, and I say again now: the ECHR must go. Not in principle, but in practice.

It’s no longer a theoretical debate. The Conservative Party is inching towards formal adoption of withdrawal as policy- belatedly, yes, but better late than never. The issue now is not whether we should leave; it is how.

That’s why, this week, I published a policy paper with the Prosperity Institute, complete with a ten-minute film for the more time-pressed, setting out the roadmap to exit. We tackle head-on the myths that have paralysed action for years: that we’d become a pariah state, that we can reform from within, that repealing the Human Rights Act is enough.

All nonsense, respectable-sounding objections masking the deeper truth: a reluctance to reassert democratic control over British law.

Perhaps the most persistent red herring is the Belfast Agreement argument. We are told, again and again, that to withdraw from the ECHR would breach the settlement, risking the fragile peace.

This is legal mythmaking: the Agreement refers to the Convention, yes – but it does not bind the UK to remain a signatory forever. The Northern Ireland Protocol was a more explicit breach of that Agreement’s spirit (as one of its architects, the late Lord Trimble argued-) and yet life carried on. Politics, after all, is the art of the possible.

So we have proposed four guiding principles for exit: legal uniformity across the UK; democratic accountability of human rights law; sincere consultation with Northern Irish communities; and a recommitment to peace through fairness, not foreign arbitration. With the invocation of Article 58 of the Convention, we would enter a six-month transition phase.

During this time, the government can, and should, engage with Dublin and Belfast on pragmatic adaptations to the 1998 settlement. If consensus cannot be reached, Parliament remains supreme. That’s not recklessness, it’s responsibility.

But let’s not pretend this is only about Northern Ireland. Reclaiming sovereignty means rebuilding our legal architecture. That includes: repealing the Human Rights Act 1998; ensuring Strasbourg rulings no longer bind UK courts; reforming judicial review; updating devolution settlements; and renegotiating the EU trade deal where necessary. None of this is radical. It is restorative.

Would any of this mean the end of human rights in Britain? Only if you believe they began in 1950. They did not. British liberty long predates the Convention. It is found in Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, and the common law: rights developed, refined, and enforced not by Brussels or Strasbourg, but by British courts and British lawmakers.

As Lord Hoffmann said, the Convention didn’t create rights; it merely echoed what our system already protected. The difference is this: our system balanced liberty with responsibility. Strasbourg often confuses liberty with license. That is why it intervenes to protect foreign criminals from deportation or halts flights meant to break the business model of people smugglers.

This is not a call for isolationism. It is a call for maturity. For a country that believes in itself enough to govern itself. For institutions shaped by the people they serve.

None of this will be easy. The institutional inertia is vast. The legal establishment will howl. Foreign editorials will wring their hands. But democracy was never meant to be easy. It was meant to be sovereign.

We now have a plan. The question is no longer whether we can do this. It is whether we have the will to do it. And that, as ever, begins with the readers of ConservativeHome.

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