Andrew Boff: Why Conservatives should champion the ECHR, not run from it

Andrew Boff is a longstanding Conservative ‘London-wide’ London Assembly member. 

For much of our history we Conservatives have understood a simple truth: liberty is best protected not by the goodwill of the state, but by firm limits upon it. We are sceptical of power, jealous of freedom and wary of over-mighty government. That’s not a modern affectation; it is one of the oldest threads in the Conservative tradition.

And that is precisely why Conservatives should be defending the European Convention on Human Rights, not treating it as a foreign imposition to be discarded when it becomes politically inconvenient.

The ECHR is not a socialist charter, nor a lawyers’ conspiracy, nor a Trojan horse for continental federalism. It is a framework designed to restrain the state and protect the individual. Conservatives should ask themselves a simple question: who benefits when governments face fewer legal limits on their power? The answer is: never the citizen.

Long before the ECHR existed, Britain was shaping the very idea of individual rights against arbitrary authority. Magna Carta limited the Crown’s power over the subject; habeas corpus protected people from indefinite detention without trial; the Bill of Rights of 1689 safeguarded freedom from cruel and unusual punishment. These were not progressive indulgences; they were conservative defences against tyranny, forged through bitter experience of what happens when power is unchecked.

The ECHR sits squarely in that tradition: it was British Conservatives who helped design it in the aftermath of the Second World War. Born out of the horrors of the Holocaust, the Convention reflected hard-learned lessons from the collapse of democratic institutions across Europe.

Without the constraints of international treaties, governments elected by popular support, on a minority of the vote, dismantled in the Thirties freedoms step by step using perfectly legal means. The architects of the ECHR understood that democracy without constraints can mutate into authoritarianism.

That lesson is no less relevant today.

We should be honest with ourselves: a future government, elected on a fragmented vote share (as we have now), could be far more radical than anything we have yet experienced. A populist authoritarian left or far-right parliament would find it much easier to suppress protest, weaken due process, politicise policing, or curtail free expression if external legal safeguards were removed. Conservatives who cheer the erosion of those safeguards may live to regret it.

Much of the current hostility to the ECHR centres on immigration and asylum. But this is a profound misdiagnosis of the problem.

The Convention does not compel governments to operate chaotic asylum systems, to lose track of case files, to take years to make basic decisions, or to draft legislation so poorly that it collapses under minimal legal scrutiny. Those failures belong squarely to domestic governance and especially to an underperforming Home Office and successive bouts of sloppy law-making.

If Parliament passes laws that are vague, internally contradictory, or plainly incompatible with existing rights obligations, it is hardly surprising that courts intervene. That is not judicial activism; it is legislative negligence. Conservatives should be angry not at judges for applying the law, but at ministers and officials who repeatedly fail to get the law right in the first place.

Nor should we forget that many ECHR protections are ones we Conservatives instinctively support: protection of property rights; fair trials; freedom of religion; protection from retrospective criminalisation; limits on surveillance and state intrusion into private life. These are not fringe concerns; they are the bedrock of a free society and a functioning market economy. Investors, entrepreneurs and families all depend on predictable legal protections against arbitrary government action.

Abandoning the ECHR would not magically restore border control or administrative competence. It would, however, send a dangerous signal: that fundamental rights are conditional on political convenience. Once that principle is conceded, it will not be Conservatives who decide how far the erosion goes.

The Conservative Party should instead reclaim the argument. The ECHR is not a brake on conservatism; it is a shield for it. It protects the individual against the excesses of the state, whoever controls it. It reflects British legal traditions more than foreign ones. And it stands as insurance against the very sort of authoritarian or socialist government Conservatives most fear.

Our task should be to govern competently, legislate clearly, and enforce the law effectively, not to dismantle the constitutional safeguards that generations before us fought to establish. We Conservatives are at our best when we conserve the things that work. The ECHR is one of those things.