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Kemi Badenoch is expected to announce a plan this weekend to leave the European convention on human rights (ECHR) if the Conservatives win the next election, as the party attempts to halt a haemorrhaging of support to Reform UK.
The move will be seized on by political opponents as evidence the Tories have lurched to the right – Russia and Belarus are the two other European countries that have opted out of the ECHR – while it could lose the party support from the political centre.
The Tory leader’s stance has hardened since last autumn, when she said leaving the treaty would not be a “silver bullet” to tackling immigration. In February, she said the UK would “probably have to leave” if the treaty prevented the government acting in the national interest.
Despite private concerns from one nation Conservatives that such a decision will force out moderate Tories, the party leader is understood to have signed off plans to leave the international agreement.
Badenoch is now expected to announce in a speech at the party’s Manchester conference on Sunday how the Tories would exit the ECHR, after a shadow cabinet meeting on the decision on Friday.
In June, Badenoch set up a commission to examine whether the UK should withdraw from a series of international legal agreements, including the ECHR and the refugee convention, and overturn some domestic legislation, such as the Climate Change Act and the Equality Act.
Centrist Tory MPs have been keeping their concerns to themselves to avoid making the party’s dire poll ratings worse. “Given where we are I’m not speaking out against it,” one said, while another added it was “difficult to argue against” given the party’s circumstances.
However, several Tories who have previously spoken out against leaving the ECHR, warning about the impact on the Good Friday agreement and the UK’s international reputation, now appear to have changed their minds.
“The ECHR is failing us all. Europe needs a new convention on asylum and immigration to cope with the world of 2025, which is very different from the world of 1945,” one MP said. “Starmer needs to be leading the charge or he’ll lose. People outside the beltway have had enough.”
Another Tory MP said: “Things have changed. When people perceive international agreements as stopping governments doing things they voted them in for – democracy comes first.” A third added: “The world has moved on in respect of the ECHR and will have moved even more by the next general election.”
The ECHR was established in 1950 and sets out the rights and freedoms people are entitled to in the 46 signatory countries of the Council of Europe. It is a central part of UK human rights law and has been used to halt attempts to deport people who are deemed to be in the UK illegally.
Critics have focused their concerns on article 3, which protects against inhuman or degrading treatment, and article 8, which helps to protect the right to private and family life.
Individuals and countries can make an application to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg (not to be confused with the Court of Justice of the EU in Luxembourg), but only if they have exhausted every domestic route.
During the Conservative leadership election, the ECHR became a dividing line between Badenoch and Robert Jenrick, who failed to become leader. Badenoch argued that leaving the ECHR would not solve the UK’s problems, while Jenrick said his party would “die” if it argued to stay in.
Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, said last week that prospective Conservative candidates should either support leaving the ECHR or stand down.
Addressing a meeting of the Thatcherite Bruges Group thinktank, he said: “I would get them to sign a contract to say they actually stand for Conservative values. I would get them to say you have got to leave the ECHR, and if you don’t want to do that, don’t stand as a Conservative.”
Moderate Conservatives were concerned by Jenrick’s words. A former Tory minister said: “This move of effectively setting an ideological purity test is a dangerous route for any political party. It is more sensible to expand your support rather than contract it.”
Labour has announced plans to attempt to restrict people’s use of the ECHR to fight deportation.
Keir Starmer said on Monday that he was ready to change the way the ECHR is applied in the UK to enable the government to deport more asylum seekers whose claims have been refused and foreign criminals who claim they are victims of torture.
He said the government needed to “look again at the interpretation” of articles 3 and 8 of the convention, which protect the rights of people against breaches of their family life, and torture or inhuman treatment if removed back to their home country.
