Gráinne Teggart is Deputy Director for Northern Ireland at Amnesty International UK.
Kemi Badenoch may have forgotten how Northern Ireland voted in the Brexit referendum – mistakenly claiming it backed Leave when in fact 56 per cent voted Remain – but what seems even more easily forgotten, or perhaps ignored, is why Northern Ireland makes tampering with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) so problematic.
Just as Brexit exposed deep fault lines, any move against the ECHR runs straight into the hard legal and political realities of the Good Friday Agreement.
At Conservative Party conference, Kemi Badenoch announced their new policy of withdrawing from the ECHR. A review she commissioned from shadow Attorney General Lord Wolfson concluded that leaving is the only way to remove what it calls “constraints” on government.
Such rhetoric may be designed to outflank Nigel Farage and shore up a battered party base, but the consequences are far from a game of political positioning. Leaving the ECHR would not simply be unwise, it would be reckless, irresponsible and ultimately unworkable; legally and politically.
The ECHR is not some optional add-on to our constitutional arrangements. It is expressly baked into the Good Friday Agreement, the painstakingly negotiated peace accord that ended decades of conflict. The UK’s Attorney General has reaffirmed that Convention membership is a condition of that treaty. The Tánaiste – Ireland’s Foreign Affairs Minister – Simon Harris, has also been clear that the Convention is “fundamental” to the Good Friday Agreement.
This is not a new discovery. When David Cameron flirted with withdrawal more than a decade ago, he commissioned leading lawyers Philippe Sands and Baroness Kennedy to assess the idea. Their conclusion on Northern Ireland was clear; it simply couldn’t be done without breaching the Good Friday Agreement. Those treaty commitments were, and remain, binding in ways that cannot be wished away.
The Good Friday Agreement is no ordinary legislation. It is an international peace treaty, endorsed by referendums north and south of Ireland, and underpinned by guarantees of rights and equality. Its text commits the UK to incorporating the Convention into Northern Ireland law. To walk away from the ECHR would not only put the UK in breach of solemn treaty obligations, it would strike at the foundations of the peace settlement itself.
The Agreement is not Westminster’s to tinker with at will. It rests on consensus, trust, and the promise that rights protections are guaranteed, not conditional on the mood of the governing party or the demands of a leadership contest.
And it is not only Northern Ireland’s peace settlement that is at stake. Membership of the ECHR underpins devolved settlements in Scotland and Wales and provides people with a vital legal backstop when governments overreach. From securing accountability for state abuses to protecting families failed by flawed investigations, the Convention has delivered justice when Governments have failed.
The ECHR is not a Brussels construct, it predates the EU and was drafted in the aftermath of the second world war, with British lawyers at its heart. It is not an alien imposition but a UK-led framework that is integral to society, devolved structures, international obligations, and credibility abroad.
It is also worth remembering that post-Brexit arrangements, including the Windsor Framework, explicitly prevent any “diminution of rights, safeguards or equality of opportunity” from what was agreed under the Good Friday Agreement. These binding legal backstops make clear that rights cannot be rolled back for the sake of a party conference applause line.
The Conservative leadership might believe that parroting this nuclear option is a bold quick fix. But like any nuclear option, the fallout would be vast. Pulling away one of the vital supports on which the Good Friday Agreement rests would jeopardise one of the most painstakingly negotiated peace settlements in modern history. It is politically reckless, legally fraught, and morally indefensible. It should not be attempted.
