Strong political case across Europe for a new Protocol to enable states to row back their worldwide obligations to refugees

On Friday, the English court of appeal overturned a temporary injunction granted by a high court judge requiring the owner of the Bell Hotel in Epping Forest, London to stop housing asylum seekers.
The government has a statutory duty to house asylum seekers who are destitute, many of whom arrive in the UK unlawfully in small boats from France. But, under the 1951 Refugee Convention, they are entitled to claim they are genuine refugees and apply for asylum whatever their nationality.
The problem is that determining refugee status is difficult and processing applications takes time, which means asylum seekers need to be housed somewhere while their applications are pending.
Housing asylum seekers in low-star hotels was thought of as a practical answer, but it ignored the impact on local communities now faced with unwanted young male asylum seekers in hotels in the middle of their communities. Inevitably, the asylum seekers’ presence has caused great local resentment and there have been protests outside the hotels, sometimes turning violent.
The Bell Hotel has housed asylum seekers for a number of years, but as a result of protests and demonstrations by local residents, the district council applied to the high court for an injunction restraining a breach of planning control on the ground that housing asylum seekers in a hotel involved a change of use.
The government applied to be joined as intervener on account of its duty to house asylum seekers but the judge refused and granted the injunction, requiring the asylum seekers to vacate the hotel by September 12.
Both the government and the hotel owner appealed and the court of appeal allowed their appeals. In a judgment scathing of the judge’s reasons, it held that the judge made a number of errors the most important of which was it was clearly desirable for the government to be heard as it has the duty to house asylum seekers, and that the balance of convenience was obviously to keep the asylum seekers at the hotel pending trial, which was only a few weeks away in October.
The unusually harsh tone of the judgment sounded as though the court of appeal was sending a clear message that populism has no place in the administration of justice.
Populism is everywhere these days, but we can’t have populist judges. We tolerate populist politicians because democracy requires it. We know from bitter experience that populist politicians stray into extreme authoritarianism but put up with them on condition they do not disturb human rights protection.
Populist far right politicians in the UK, like Reform’s Nigel Farage, say they would deport all refugees who arrive unlawfully and detain them in centres pending deportation. Farage euphemistically called them Nightingale-type centres – concentration camps more like!
To do this, a Reform government would withdraw from the 1951 Refugee Convention and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). As Reform is 15 per cent ahead of Labour in the latest opinion polls, it is time to address the refugee crisis head on.
What can legitimately be looked at is the 1967 Protocol attached to the 1951 Convention that removed the original geographical limitation on refugees from Europe. In 1951, the UK undertook obligations to refugees if they were displaced in Europe, which it extended to refugees worldwide under the 1967 Protocol.
There is now clearly a strong political case across the whole of Europe for a new Protocol to enable states to row back their worldwide obligations and limit them geographically to refugees from Europe.
However, Reform must not be allowed to touch European human rights protection in the UK as that would be a sure road to authoritarian rule. Only two articles of the ECHR impinge on immigration control: article 3, that protects people from torture and inhuman and degrading treatment, which is protected under UK law anyway; and article 8, that protects the right to respect for a person’s private and family life – a qualified right that can be tightened by immigration rules if necessary.
Farage tells anyone who will listen that human rights law has been responsible for Britain’s immigration problem, but that is disingenuous. He knows that immigration has been a problem in the UK since the 1960s, when Enoch Powell made his famous anti-immigration speech at a time when human rights law was unknown in legal practice – human rights law became fashionable in 1998 after the passing of the Human Rights Act 1998.
Farage has been in favour of sending immigrants back to their countries of origin ever since he was a schoolboy at Dulwich College. He was highly political then, on the far right anti-immigration wing of the Conservative Party, which he left in the 1990s to found UKIP. He entered the European Parliament as an MEP for the UK Independence Party in 1999 with an agenda for the UK to leave the EU to stop the freedom of movement of EU nationals into the UK from the EU.
The immigration problem in the UK comprises the illegal arrival of asylum seekers; the presence of persons unlawfully in the UK as illegal entrants and overstayers; the volume of lawful immigration; and the number of immigrants or persons of immigrant heritage settled in the UK with or without British citizenship.
One way of addressing the immigration problem in the UK is the introduction of identity cards. In modern, technologically-advanced societies that have them it is impossible to function without being able, at any time in most interactions, to prove your identity as a citizen – and if it is impossible to function people will not come.