Victims of institutional injustices including Grenfell, Hillsbourgh, Windrush and the infected blood scandals say the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is ‘more vital than ever’
Victims of Britain’s most harrowing institutional injustices have united to call on ministers not to tear up vital human rights protections.
Families affected by the Grenfell, Hillsborough, infected blood and Windrush scandals, as well as Covid bereaved campaigners, have written a powerful letter branding the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) “more vital than ever”. Last week Reform chief Nigel Farage put forward a Bill calling on the UK to leave – a move campaigners say would be catastrophic.
The groups wrote that the convention was vital in their battle to shine light on state cover-ups and failings. Their letter said: “We write as groups who know what it means when institutions fail and when truth, accountability, and justice are denied.
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“Without the protections of the ECHR, many of our struggles would have been longer, lonelier, and more hopeless. The Convention gave us not a guarantee of justice, but the possibility of it: the chance to demand answers, to press for accountability, and to challenge power when it turned away. It is a safeguard against silence.”
They warned it would be a betrayal to withdraw from the ECHR, which has been in place in 1950 and counted Winston Churchill among its advocates. The letter goes on: “Today, in an uncertain world marked by division, conflict, and creeping authoritarianism, the values of the ECHR are more vital than ever.
“To weaken or withdraw from it would be to betray not only those who rely on its protections now, but also those who fought and sacrificed to secure it.”
Among those to sign it are Grenfell United, Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice, the Tainted Blood Campaign, Justice4Windrush, Hillsborough justice lawyer Elkan Abrahamson, and Imran Khan KC, lawyer for Stephen Lawrence’s family.
INQUEST, Reclaim These Streets, Police Spies out of Lives and the Centre for Military Justice have also put their names to the letter.
Tom Morrison, Amnesty UK’s Legal Protection for Human Rights Campaign Manager, said: “When campaigners on the biggest justice fights of our time – Grenfell, Hillsborough, infected blood and Covid-bereaved families – unite, political leaders should listen.
“These families know what happens when institutions fail and the truth is denied. The European Convention on Human Rights is often the only route to justice when the state lets people down. Weakening it would risk silencing those who need it most and take away one of the only powers they have to level the playing field.”
Both Reform UK and the Tory Party have committed to taking Britain out of the ECHR, arguing it impedes efforts to protect the UK’s borders.
Keir Starmer has said the Governement needs to “look again at the interpretation” by the UK courts of the ECHR and other international treaties. But he says Labour will not withdraw.
Last week Mr Farage’s Bill was voted down by a majority of 154 to 96. In a blistering attack by Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey, the Reform leader was accused of “making his career by damaging this country” and pandering to Donald Trump.
Sir Ed told the Commons: “These laws help individuals hold the powerful to account, to hold governments to account. These laws can get justice when the elite and powerful cover up and abuse their power.”
He went on: “If we do what reform wants, the biggest cheers will come from the Kremlin and from Beijing, from Tehran, from Pyongyang, and from dictators and authoritarian regimes the world over.”
Putting his case forward Mr Farage said anger is “growing in the country” and said: “I do not believe that it is right that we should when it comes to controlling our borders – when it comes to who should be able legally to live, work and settle in this country, or indeed who should not be allowed to stay in our country – for this to be under the remit, firstly, of judges in Strasbourg, who, by the way, are jurists, most of them not even legally qualified, and secondly, under the political control of judges in this country who now can make their own interpretation of what we’ve understood for many, many years to be British common law.”