Theresa May cannot pick and choose her battles on human rights

The Prime Minister came to office with a mixed record of compassion and illiberalism. At some point she will have to choose

Theresa May pictured on Christmas Day attending a service at St Andrew's Church (PA)

One of the great mysteries of Theresa May when she became Prime Minister was whether she was a left-wing or a right-wing Conservative? She was once a moderniser who urged the Tories to shed their “nasty party” image, and as Home Secretary she fought modern slavery and the unjustified stopping and searching of ethnic minority citizens by the police.

But she was also the leading proponent in Government of repudiating the European Convention on Human Rights and made an anti-immigration speech at Conservative conference that many of her fellow Tories found shocking.

And now, six months on, we are none the wiser.

During the Conservative leadership contest – cut short by Andrea Leadsom’s withdrawal, which propelled Ms May straight to No 10 – she dropped her plan to take Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights and its court, admitting that there was no majority for such a policy in Parliament. That seemed to be a pragmatic concession to common sense, realising that leaving the European Union is enough of an upheaval without leaving the separate machinery of wider European human rights law. Even though The Independent sees no need for it, most of the Conservative Party could unite behind a cosmetic rewrite of the Human Rights Act (David Cameron’s so-called “British Bill of Rights”) that would still allow Britain to continue to be a signatory to the Convention after Brexit.

This week, however, it has emerged that Ms May intends to put a promise to withdraw from the Convention in the 2020 Tory manifesto. This is a bad idea on three levels.

First, it is legally fraught. As we report today, an attempt to withdraw from the Convention is vulnerable to challenge in the courts, because the right of appeal to the European Court of Human Rights (the one in Strasbourg that is nothing to do with the EU) is a treaty obligation guaranteed in Northern Ireland by the Good Friday Agreement.

Second, it is politically fraught. Even if pulling out of the ECHR were a manifesto pledge, which should ensure it would pass the House of Lords under the Salisbury Convention, it must be possible at the very least that sufficient Tory MPs in the Commons would fail to support it. That would be a bad fight for Ms May to lose.

The reason she cannot rely on her own MPs, even whipped and bound by party policy, is also the third reason it is a bad idea: because it is wrong in principle.

The Independent understands Ms May’s frustrations with the European Convention and the way the court often interprets it. It made it hard for her, when she was Home Secretary, to deport people whose presence here is not, in the standard phrase, “conducive to the public good”, either because some of the evidence against them might have been obtained (in other countries) by torture, or because there is a risk that they might be tortured if returned to their home country.

But that is the whole point of an international law of human rights. It is designed to protect unpopular people even when to do so is inconvenient for political leaders. That is why the European Convention, because it is above the British state, is so important in guaranteeing the rights of both sides in the Northern Ireland settlement.

Ms May came to office espousing some fine rhetoric of fighting the “burning injustice” of discrimination against the poor, non-whites and women. Her record as Home Secretary in trying to disrupt the causes of modern slavery was admirable.

But on fundamental human rights, she seems to be alarmingly selective. She should abandon the counterproductive and illiberal idea of turning Britain into a pariah state by withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights.