Ms Stella Creasy

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge (Cat Eccles) for securing this important debate. George Orwell said: “There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” I am not mad when I say that the debate on leaving the ECHR is nothing to do with immigration; I am telling the truth, which is something I hope the hon. Member for Great Yarmouth (Rupert Lowe) will finally come to realise. The convention is not designed to interfere with immigration policy; it says nothing about immigration, and the Court has long acknowledged the right of states to control their borders. That is why Oxford University data shows that only 3.5% of deportations of foreign criminals were successfully appealed on human rights grounds. That is the truth. The fundamental purpose of the ECHR is to protect people from Governments of all colours. It stopped the Georgian Government arbitrarily detaining people. The Polish state has had to compensate thousands of citizens who had property taken away. Children in the Czech Republic were given rights to school. The failures of the French Government to tackle modern slavery were addressed. That is why apologists for authoritarian Governments such as the Russians hate it, and why they use immigration as a cover for their attacks. Now people want us to make the same mistake again—of walking away, not being in the room and isolating ourselves, as we did in Europe through Brexit—by walking away from the protection the ECHR offers our citizens: the protection that helped the Hillsborough families get justice, the protection that helped the victims of the black-cab rapist John Worboys, the protection that secured human rights and abortion access in Northern Ireland. Even if people do not care about victims of crime or of miscarriages of justice, or about those who have been forced out of our armed forces for being gay, they might care about taxes. In February this year, the Court forced the Italians to stop a series of tax raids on companies because it was against their human rights. All of that—those basic rights—are at stake. And that is before we even get to the fact that it is the foundation of our trade agreements, and why other countries want to do business with us, that we follow the rule of law and hold ourselves accountable to a shared standard. That is why the ECHR is the foundation of the Good Friday agreement and is written into the EU trade and co-operation agreement, especially the deals on crime and policing.