DANIEL HANNAN: If European human rights judges insist on siding with Shamima Begum, they'll all end up being swept away
SOURCE:Daily Mail
Are they actively trying to push us out? Is the European Court of Human Rights secretly trying to undermine the whole concept of international law?
Are they actively trying to push us out? Is the European Court of Human Rights secretly trying to undermine the whole concept of international law?
Or can its lawyers truly be this insensitive?
The Strasbourg court has informed Britain that it will review our decision to keep Shamima Begum out of our country. Begum was one of three girls from Bethnal Green who chose to join the Islamic State in 2015, when the crimes of that organisation – the beheadings of aid workers, the torture of civilians, the rape of Yazidi women – were well known.
After the defeat of IS, Begum decided she wanted to come back to the country on which she had effectively declared war when she joined its enemies. In 2019, the then Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, ruled that she was a security threat and should in no circumstances be allowed to return, a decision upheld by our domestic courts.
Now, represented by one of the numerous human rights firms brought into existence by Blairite legislation in the late 1990s, Begum is having another go.
Why choose this moment? Perhaps because the barrister who acted for her when she was appealing against her loss of British citizenship in 2020, Richard Hermer, is now Sir Keir Starmer’s Attorney General.
Hermer has a history of representing clients hostile to the Crown, including a convicted terrorist who worked with Al Qaeda, the mother of one of the IS ‘Beatles’ and Gerry Adams.
The Strasbourg court has informed Britain that it will review our decision to keep Shamima Begum (pictured) out of our country
Hermer (pictured) has a history of representing clients hostile to the Crown, including a convicted terrorist who worked with Al Qaeda, the mother of one of the IS ‘Beatles’ and Gerry Adams
If this is the cab-rank principle in action, we can only wonder at his fortune in seeming repeatedly to attract a certain kind of customer.
What makes this case different is Begum’s notoriety. It is unusual for Islamist badmashes to become household names in Britain. Few of us could identify either the Beatle’s mother for whom Hermer acted (Maha Elgizouli, since you ask) or the Al Qaeda collaborator (Rangzieb Ahmed).
But almost everyone can put a name and a face to Begum. We recall the interviews she gave from her Syrian detention centre, in which she spoke of being unfazed by the beheadings around her.
She has, perhaps under coaching, now changed her tune, and claims to have been led astray. The only constant is her sense of entitlement and self-pity.
Any Fleet Street editor knows that, for a story to take off, there needs to be a recognisable villain.
When we come across outrageous rulings based on the European Convention – overturning the deportation of paedophiles on grounds that they would face ‘hostility’ in their home country, for example, or criminals because their child does not like Albanian food – we rarely register who they are.
It is Begum’s familiarity that makes her such a dangerous cause for supporters of the ECHR to take up. For a foreign court to overrule, not only a succession of Home Secretaries of both parties, but also the British courts, would radicalise a great many people who, until now, have not been especially exercised by the ECHR.
Starmer was ‘delighted’ to secure the immigration to this country of the Egyptian activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah, who, it emerged, calls the British ‘dogs and monkeys’
It may not be the ECHR’s most significant case, nor the most legally outrageous; but it would be the most politically charged.
I can see how one might construct an argument to the effect that Begum, born and raised in east London, is Britain’s responsibility. That argument would be stronger if the same coalition of human rights activists and shyster lawyers who support her return was not certain, once she arrived, to oppose her incarceration.
Still, as a matter of pure law, I can think of cases where the ECHR has overstepped its powers more flagrantly than this – for example, its recent ruling that Switzerland should change its climate policy.
This case, though, is the one that will turn the public implacably against, not just membership of the ECHR, but the whole concept of international accords that constrain elected parliaments.
Indeed, there is a danger that, in reacting against the over-reach of human rights lawyers, we will turn on the entire post-1945 legal order, including the idea that countries ought not to attack one another.
The United States is already well on that road, backing the Russian position on Ukraine while making annexationist claims against Canada and Greenland.
In much of Europe, parties that take a similar view – Putinite, authoritarian, contemptuous of the very concept of order among nations – lead the opinion polls, from the Rassemblement National in France to Germany’s AfD.
If they were wise, supporters of international law would accept that it was never supposed to curl its tendrils into every nook and crevice of national life.
They would recognise that it is time to withdraw from essentially national questions, such as whether prisoners vote, whether religious symbols may be worn at work and which criminals should face deportation.
They would focus instead on upholding the essentials of the post-war order: that borders may not be changed by force, that democracy is preferable to dictatorship, that negotiation is better than war, that treaties should be adhered to.
Begum (centre) was one of three girls from Bethnal Green who chose to join the Islamic State in 2015, when the crimes of that organisation were well known
The trouble is that we are governed by human rights lawyers, for whom national loyalties are arbitrary and transient, but human rights are global and absolute. Not only Lord Hermer but, more seriously, the Prime Minister, who told his biographer, Tom Baldwin: ‘There is no version of my life that does not largely revolve around me being a human rights lawyer.’
It is sometimes alleged that Starmer does not believe in anything, but that is untrue. His core belief, whether as a Trotskyist student, as Director of Public Prosecutions, as a Corbyn yes-man or as PM, is that human rights, interpreted by a cadre of lawyers like himself, are universal and non-negotiable. He set out this creed at great length in a book about European human rights law in 1999.
Although he tried to avoid open partisanship as DPP, he made an exception in 2009
to fulminate against Tory plans to replace the Human Rights Act with a British Bill Of Rights: ‘The idea that human rights should somehow stop in the English Channel is odd and, frankly, impossible to defend.’
That attitude explains why he was ‘delighted’ to secure the immigration to this country of the Egyptian activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah, who, it emerged, calls the British ‘dogs and monkeys’ and boasts ‘I seriously, seriously, seriously hate white people.’
El-Fattah is not British in any meaningful sense. He was not born here and never lived here. His claim stems from the fact his mother was born here while her mother was at a British university.
Like Begum, he has only recently decided the country he despises might offer a useful escape hatch. But, to Hermer and Starmer, citizenship is divorced from loyalty. If anything, performative anti-Britishness is preferable to excessive patriotism.
It is this the public is reacting against. And I don’t think our leaders have grasped the intensity of the reaction.
Our adherence to the ECHR is almost certainly at an end. The Conservatives, following a forensic review under Lord Wolfson, have set out a plan to come out of the system and Reform, with less detail but no less passion, have always argued for withdrawal.
Starmer, too, is on his last legs, his advocacy of El-Fattah being, for many, the final straw.
The question is whether any aspects of the international order will survive the coming tidal wave. If human rights lawyers insist on taking their stand on cases like Begum’s, the whole lot will be swept away.
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere is a Conservative peer and President of the Insitute For Free Trade.