Annual Human Rights Statement 2025 Launch: Address by Lord Anderson of Ipswich KBE KC

The first time I spoke in Northern Ireland about human rights was at the end of the last century, when I was invited to address future barristers and solicitors at the Institute of Professional Legal Studies at Queen’s University.

This was a new subject to most British lawyers at the time, with the Human Rights Act yet to enter into force, so I began, in my innocence and as I had often done before, with an elementary canter through the Articles of the European Convention on Human Rights. My audience had other ideas. A few minutes into my speech, a beefy arm was raised in the back row of the audience. From its owner came something between a question and a command: “Can you tell us what limitations are permissible on the right to march?”

That was my introduction to the fact that this is a place where human rights really matter, and where they are woven into the fabric of public life to a degree that is not the case, or at least not widely understood to be the case, on the other side of the Irish Sea.

My education continued after 2010, when I used to come here regularly in my capacity as Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation – one of the most enjoyable parts of that fascinating job. I fear that I did not make any distinctively Northern Irish-flavoured contribution to the conundrum of how to reconcile the defence of civil liberties with the demands of national security. But I was here enough to gain a deep appreciation for the work of Alyson Kilpatrick in her capacity as human rights adviser to the Policing Board, to which I gave evidence from time to time, and also for the work of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, with whom I spoke regularly.

So I was delighted when Aly and the Commission came together to realise each other’s potential. The Commission’s statutory responsibilities are extremely wide-ranging – as reflected in the 620 pages of the annual report that is launched today. The reader is encouraged at the start to read the report “from cover-to-cover”. But for anyone too faint-hearted to do that, the document is easy to navigate and its red-amber-green system provides an instant guide to the most significant outstanding issues – even if those lights seem overwhelmingly to be stuck at amber, with a smattering of reds and sad to report, not a single green.

The report is evidence of the Commission’s exacting standards, but also of the energy with which it brings and supports legal cases, briefs legislators and gives advice both to the Northern Ireland Executive and to the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.

But what do all those amber lights mean? Are they amber traffic lights, which will eventually turn to green if only we have the patience to wait? Or are they more like the amber lights that come on to the dashboard when we are driving – a warning of trouble to come, even of possible breakdown?

My cross-bench colleague Lord Lisvane, a former Clerk of the House of Commons, likes to say of the United Kingdom’s constitution that “expensive noises are coming from the engine”. The same is sadly but undoubtedly true of what is sometimes called the international rules-based order.

We see growing disrespect across the world for internationally-agreed systems – whether their purpose is to regulate trade, to mitigate climate change, to ensure respect for territorial integrity, to outlaw the targeted killing of civilians or to ensure accountability for the very gravest crimes.

International mechanisms for human rights protection, too, are being questioned, defied and disregarded. The current regimes in Russia and China are not the first to characterise human rights as an alien concept invented by hypocritical westerners in their own interest. But illiberal governments, intolerant of constraints and scornful of minority rights, are now appearing even in Europe and North America. The core values of democracy, rule of law and respect for human rights brought our continent together after the Second World War, the end of fascism in the south of Europe and the fall of Communism in the east. They are once more under threat.

The United Kingdom still remains in all its essentials a liberal democracy – but international human rights do not command universal or uncritical support. Human rights scepticism takes three main forms.

The first and most sinister form derives from a worldview that rejects any impediment to an elected government, and may even be not too fussy about the means by which that government is elected. Its adherents take aim not only at human rights but at other counterbalances to raw political power or the commercial interests associated with it: judicial review by independent judges, public service broadcasting, the regulation of social media, anti-corruption laws, the enforcement of standards in public life, political funding constraints, even – as we saw in the prorogation crisis – a Parliament which is unwilling to allow the Prime Minister his every wish. In its strongest form, this thin, winner-takes-all philosophy is opposed to everything that we understand a plural democracy to be. Its pressures need to be stoutly resisted, whether they are applied from home or abroad.

The second and more prevalent form of opposition to international human rights is based on a resistance to international influence in general: the Brexit mantra of “taking back control”. At its worst, this is unthinking and narrow-minded nationalism. A more sophisticated variant is to press the parallel with countries like Canada and New Zealand, whose domestic human rights protection, though not without controversy, is less influenced than ours by the rulings of international courts. These countries are internationally respectable, it is argued, and our own judges are second to none. Why should they not be capable of protecting human rights without the assistance of jurists, however admirable, from Turkey, Armenia and the Balkans?

This is not a negligible point. But whatever its merits in other parts of the world, the argument for going it alone has less force in the particular circumstances of Europe: a patchwork of small countries, intimately reliant on cooperation with each other – notably in justice and security – and dependent for that purpose on the common framework that we know as the European Convention.

Even if those who dislike the Convention system were prepared to replicate its protections at national level, which is inherently unlikely, a purely national system of protection would lack the guarantee of supranational enforcement to which all our neighbours are subject and which they therefore not unreasonably expect of us. The remarkable capabilities of GCHQ, with its potential to access and interrogate communications across the world, are not deemed to be an obstacle to data-sharing because of the internationally agreed human rights framework by which they are governed both at home and in Strasbourg. This requires of them a degree of transparency, effective oversight and the minimum necessary intrusion into individual privacy. The UK’s Trade and Cooperation Agreement with the European Union allows the EU, on the day that we leave the Convention or denounce its principles, immediately to terminate our access to crime databases, our extradition arrangements and our participation in Europol and Eurojust. Withdrawal from the Convention, rather than enabling us (as one senior politician has suggested) to “protect the public and secure our borders”, would threaten our ability to do both.

The third and most benign form of criticism acknowledges the geopolitical value of international human rights instruments. However, it regards them not as immutable records of the universal rights of all mankind, but rather as political constructs which may need to be altered as global circumstances change. The fact that the Convention does not grant Article 6 fair trial rights to asylum-seekers was, after all, the outcome of a political process driven by the original contracting states. Given the status of the Convention as a “living instrument”, whose interpretation can be taken in sometimes unexpected directions by the European Court, as for example on the issue of extraterritorial jurisdiction, it is not unreasonable for governments to expect some continuing influence on the direction of travel.

If this third form of criticism is a heresy, then I must confess to being a heretic. The principal means by which states may influence the Court is, and should remain, by their submissions in individual cases. These can be especially persuasive if joint submissions are made by a significant group of states, as was done in the recent Ukraine and Netherlands v Russia case. Judicial independence is guaranteed as things stand and must of course remain, sacrosanct. But if a sufficient number of national governments are concerned at a systemic level by the manner in which their Convention is being understood or applied, then why should they not be entitled to issue declarations, to adopt protocols and even, should a pressing need ever arise, to tweak the wording of the substantive Articles of the Convention, as the EU did when formulating its Charter of Fundamental Rights.

This is a position that comes relatively easily to British lawyers because of the nature of our own constitution, which is political rather than judicial in nature. Our courts have no authority to overrule Acts of Parliament, whereas Parliament may effectively reverse Supreme Court judgments, as it did recently in the Safety of Rwanda Act 2024 and the Deprivation of Citizenship Orders (Effect during Appeal) Act 2025.

Successive Westminster governments, similarly, have asked Parliament to reverse the Supreme Court’s ruling that Gerry Adams’s internment in 1973 was unlawful because it had not been authorised personally by the Secretary of State. The human rights memorandum prepared by the government to accompany Clauses 89 and 90 of the Northern Ireland Troubles Bill 2025 is striking for its bluntness:

“The Department considers that the conclusion in Adams that the legislation displaced the Carltona principle, and the making of an ICO therefore required the personal consideration of the Secretary of State, was unexpected and wrong.”

Within the Council of Europe, attempts to question the direction of judicial travel by essentially political initiatives are future-facing only, and approached with considerably greater delicacy than was on display in that memorandum. But a number of declarations have been adopted by the States pursuant to the so-called Interlaken process, including the Brighton declaration of 2012. The Court was consulted during this process, and the then 47 contracting states agreed unanimously at Brighton to amend the preamble to the Convention to emphasise the importance of subsidiarity and the margin of appreciation. The declaration, with its associated protocols, has been credited with influencing the Court’s approach, and with assisting it in keeping its case load under control. More recently, pressure from the UK in particular helped secure further reforms in 2023 to the Court’s procedures governing interim measures, though members of the Court have been anxious to emphasise that it had embarked upon this process on its own initiative.

Purists see measures such as these as improperly political interventions: I disagree. The pursuit of change, including change should it ever be required to the Articles of the Convention themselves, is surely a more productive outlet for frustration than allowing controversy over the Convention and its enforcement to spill over into public disaffection and threats to withdraw.

LONDON

I turn now to summarise how things look from London – or more particularly, from Westminster. One might have thought that the intensified threat to liberal democracy in Europe – the principle in defence of which we fought the Second World War – would have prompted a renewed commitment to the Convention and its values. But in the world of British politics, the reality is often more inward-looking.

In the early part of this decade, human rights scepticism focused on the Human Rights Act rather than the European Convention. An Independent Human Rights Act Review was commissioned in 2020, but its findings, generally supportive of the Act, were ignored in favour of Dominic Raab’s Bill of Rights Bill of 2022, which met with objections from all sides and did not long outlast Mr Raab’s own tenure as Lord Chancellor. More subject-specific attacks on Convention rights were contained in further Acts, ranging from the Overseas Operations Act 2021 and Illegal Migration Act 2023 to the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023 and Safety of Rwanda Act 2024.

Since the 2024 general election, scepticism on the political right has hardened. Reform and the Conservatives, currently polling at a combined level of around 50%, have each committed to pulling the UK out of the ECHR if they form the next government, without saying what if any domestic bill of rights they may put in its place. Their positions are extreme, even by the standards of far-right parties in Europe: neither the National Rally in France nor Alternativ für Deutschland in Germany backs ECHR withdrawal. But the threat is a real one. The result of the next Westminster election cannot be reliably predicted – but history tells us that the right wins more often than the left.

Behind these policy positions is a series of papers published over the past few months by Policy Exchange, the Centre for Policy Studies and the shadow Attorney General, Lord Wolfson. These papers have a largely domestic focus, and rather than attempting an overall audit of the UK’s participation in the Convention, tend to concentrate on a few selected themes. The main one is the issue of migration, which has been estimated to account for around 2% of the European Court’s case law. Other controversial subjects are the application of the Convention to operations in Iraq and Afghanistan (though there are fewer accusations of judicial overreach when the Court condemns Russian poisonings and invasions), the grant of interim measures, and the Swiss climate change case.

The political mood is influenced, at a less rarefied level, by press criticism of a ferocity not much encountered elsewhere in Europe. Someone whose information came from the press would not guess that the UK lost only one case in the European Court last year – about the recoverability of success fees in defamation proceedings – or that the successful applicant in that case was Associated Newspapers Ltd., which publishes the Daily Mail.

Pledges to withdraw from the ECHR have not come out of the blue: the issue has long been a rallying call on the right. Each of the past five Conservative Prime Ministers, from David Cameron to Rishi Sunak, expressed at least scepticism about membership – not least Theresa May, who as Home Secretary shortly before the EU Referendum called on the UK, in as many words, to leave “the ECHR and the jurisdiction of its court”.

Other politicians, principally on the left, continue to defend the Convention. They point to the changes that the European Court has in the past prompted to our own law, from birching in schools to gays in the military. Few of these changes are now controversial – though sceptics argue that they would have happened by now even without the ECHR, through more democratically appropriate political mechanisms.

Defenders of the Convention system point also to the difficulties that leaving it would cause for the UK’s relations with the EU, for the devolution settlement and in particular for the situation of Northern Ireland. Policy Exchange and Lord Wolfson have argued that withdrawal from the Convention would not breach the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement. But even if that argument were right in law – and the CAJ has published a strongly reasoned objection to it, written by Professor Colin Murray – that would still leave what is surely the core political issue of how, if at all, nationalist mistrust of purely British safeguards could be squared with the removal of European Court supervision.

These are important arguments, but not easy ones to sell to anglocentric voters. Indeed politicians are often reluctant to celebrate the transformative ideals of human rights law, and the United Kingdom’s outsize role in promoting and developing it. This is reminiscent of the Brexit debate, in which remainers tended to make defensive and transactional arguments rather than a positive case based on the projection of British influence, opportunity for the young, collective strength and security in an uncertain world.

It is mostly academics and NGOs, rather than the politicians, who have been injecting such passion as there is into the ECHR debate. The Bonavero Institute at the University of Oxford has published two major reports, one focused on the migration issue and the other more general in scope. And last month, almost 300 groups, ranging from the Tainted Blood Campaign to the Centre for Military Justice, joined Liberty in a letter calling for a full-throated defence of the Convention on its 75^th anniversary.

Our current Prime Minister is of course an experienced human rights advocate and respected writer on the subject. He also has the distinction of being Aly Kilpatrick’s predecessor at the Northern Ireland Policing Board. For as long as his hand is on the tiller, our full participation in the ECHR is not in doubt. But Convention scepticism has long been a feature on the left as well as the right of politics.

It was after the Labour Lord Chancellor William Jowitt who told Atlee’s cabinet in 1950 that adherence to the Convention would jeopardise our whole system of law “in favour of some half-baked scheme administered by some unknown court”; and Sir Hartley Shawcross, lead British prosecutor at Nuremberg and Labour Attorney General who dismissed the right of individuals to bring cases in Strasbourg as “wholly opposed to the theory of responsible government”.

Similar views have been expressed by Lord Glasman, leader of the “Blue Labour” movement and a strong supporter of the current Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood. He told GB News this September that Labour should withdraw the United Kingdom from the European Convention, adding for good measure: “we should never have been in it in the first place”.

Given the political background, perhaps we should be surprised that public support for the UK’s continued membership is as high as it is. A Savanta/Amnesty poll last month found that 48% wanted to remain party to the Convention, as against 26% who wanted to leave. But as was the case in relation to EU membership prior to the 2016 referendum, support for the Convention has varied considerably over the years.

Few things in politics are certain. Whether a pledge survives a change of leader, and whether it is activated immediately or becomes a “second-term priority” that turns out be too difficult to proceed with, are questions that cannot be reliably judged in advance. The situation is not yet urgent. But we may fairly say that the amber light marked “ECHR withdrawal” is flashing ominously on the dashboard.

In the meantime, the current government is taking the initiative – not only within the Council of Europe, of which more in a moment, but domestically as well. On 17^th November, the Home Secretary announced a number of changes aimed at limiting the use of Article 8 – respect for private and family life – to frustrate removals from the country. These include rebalancing the public interest test, adopting a restrictive definition of family life, and limiting the routes by which Article 8 claims can be made, especially from abroad. The European Court in Otite v UK displayed a measure of tolerance similar domestic provisions introduced in 2014, rejecting the submission that they prevented a meaningful proportionality assessment and amounted to a systematic violation of Article 8 rights.

Further strong domestic guidance was issued this June in the case of Andrysiewicz v Poland, this time by the judiciary. The Supreme Court noted that Article 8 was being raised “almost as a matter of course in every extradition case”, and made its disapproval clear, ruling that in future it was “most unlikely” that a plea of disproportionate interference with private life would ever succeed, and that reliance on family life would have no prospects of success save in cases of “exceptionally severe impact”. The European Court will no doubt push back if it sees the need to do so: for my part, I should be surprised if it does.

Article 3 among other things imposes an absolute prohibition on deporting or extraditing people to countries where there is a real risk that they will suffer not only torture but inhuman or degrading treatment. The relatively low threshold for inhuman and degrading treatment,[1] applicable to domestic and international cases alike,[2] coupled with the fact that balancing factors such as risk to the domestic population may not be taken into account, has given rise to some domestic extradition judgments that though well-reasoned and faithful to the Convention case law, come to results that fair-minded people may reasonably find difficult to accept.[3] Though Article 3 is absent from the Home Secretary’s domestic to-do list, it was marked by her, I think justifiably, for attention at international level.

STRASBOURG

The view from Strasbourg is of course not uniform, since 46 countries are represented at the Council of Europe. Their representatives there communicate generally in English; and in the margins, British cultural products from Yes Minister to Harry Potter are widespread points of common cultural reference. But the content and tone of Strasbourg conversations are quite different from those in London. Having spent most of the week there, as I do every few months, may I leave you with three, of course impressionistic, snapshots.

My first snapshot is from the quarterly human rights meeting of the Committee of Ministers in Strasbourg. Government Ministers do sometimes attend these meetings of the CM(DH), as it is called, but its regular attenders are the Ambassadors of the 46 member states of the Council of Europe.

They meet for the purpose of supervising the execution of judgments of the European Court of Human Rights. Given the political nature of the enforcement mechanism and the fact that every state finds itself under scrutiny from time to time, one might have thought that the states would be easy on one another – but that is not my experience. Progress can be frustratingly slow, as in all international institutions. But on issue after issue – ranging from the safeguards in closed material proceedings to the segregation of Roma pupils, the ill-treatment of migrants and the irreducibility of a life sentence imposed on a mentally ill prisoner – pressure is gently or not so gently applied, most states do their best to comply, and supervision continues to the point where it is no longer needed.

Last week’s first debate was on the McKerr v UK group of cases on the failure to conduct Article 2-compliant investigations into actions of the security forces in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. This saga has consumed a good deal of CM(DH) time over the years. On Tuesday the UK government carefully explained its latest legislative proposals, the Irish government added its comments and an agreed way forward was presented to the Committee for approval. Of course the two governments have other fora in which to talk, and breakthroughs in such matters depend not on the strictures of other States so much as on a favourable political climate. But the international context of the discussion, and the discipline and transparency imposed by the Convention procedures – not to mention a case brought in the Strasbourg Court by Ireland – were material factors in the progress made.

My second snapshot is from the corridors of the Council of Europe – where all the buzz is about the inter-ministerial conference on migration to be held in Strasbourg this Wednesday, attended by our Deputy Prime Minister and Attorney General. That conference is expected to arrive at a political declaration which will set out the positive role of the Convention and the Court, while referring to the difficulties experienced by member States in expelling and removing convicted foreign criminals. More work will be signalled on migrant smuggling, returns and migrant hubs, and the Committee of Ministers will be tasked to come up with a draft political declaration on migration and the Convention for adoption at a dedicated conference of Foreign Ministers in Chişinău next May.

This initiative was initially set in train by an open letter from nine EU countries, led by Denmark and Italy. Though its tone was unwelcome to some, a substantial number of other states, including the United Kingdom, soon associated themselves with its sentiments. The 2026 political declaration will no doubt emphasise the relatively hands-off approach that the Court itself has been taking to Article 8, evident from cases like Savran v Denmark. I hope that it will also be possible to address the Article 3 concerns to which I have alluded, for example the issue of when the inhuman and degrading treatment threshold will be met in the context of medical care and prison conditions.

A declaration along these lines would go further than those already adopted as part of the Interlaken process, because it would touch on the substantive interpretation of Convention rights rather than simply their procedural application. Nobody expects it to be easy to negotiate. But for the elected governments of the contracting states to bring this debate to a meaningful conclusion would be not only a proper diplomatic exercise but a welcome one.

My third and final snapshot – taken this time with a wide-angle lens – is from the extra-judicial writing of judges whose terms at the European Court recently came to an end.

The former Irish Judge Siofra O’Leary, in an article co-written in October with her Bulgarian colleague Yonko Grozev, addressed what she described as “the obvious pattern of democratic decay” in these words:

“Over the last two decades, Europe has witnessed different variations of illiberal democracy and authoritarian forms of government, rolled out at different speeds but usually achieved by the use of political and very often legal means to dismantle democratic institutions and undermine human rights.”

She went on to explain how procedural mechanisms, from interim measures to case management and the pilot judgment procedure, could enable the Court and the Committee of Ministers, despite their budgetary constraints, to bring pressure to bear where it is most needed.

The recently retired United Kingdom judge Tim Eicke, in his Harry Weinrebe lecture also given in October, dealt conscientiously with the standard United Kingdom complaints concerning the migration case law, interim measures, the living instrument doctrine and so on. He made clear however his frustration at what he described as “a debate in much of which I hardly recognise the Court I so recently served on”, going on to emphasise the utterly uncontroversial nature of most of the Court’s judgments, and to highlight the wider significance of some of them.

Eicke referred in particular to the 15 inter-State cases pending before the Court, from Georgia v Russia to Armenia v Azerbaijan. He highlighted the recent 500-page judgment in Ukraine and Netherlands v Russia, accompanied by 2000 pages of evidence, concerning the fighting in Eastern Ukraine in 2014, the shooting down of MH17 the same year and the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. He added:

“When one considers that, to date and for the foreseeable future, the Strasbourg Court has and will be the only international court which has comprehensively engaged with the question of Russia’s responsibility as a matter of international law for the human rights violations that occurred in those conflicts, it is very difficult to see how it can legitimately be said the Convention and Court have outlived their usefulness or are no longer fit for purpose.”

When visiting Ukraine to monitor human rights compliance for the Council of Europe, 25 years ago, I would not have predicted the vigour with which its brave people have resisted the Russian aggressor. But two revolutions and two invasions later, Ukraine has chosen European values and European institutions – at their core, the fundamental rights and freedoms that we collectively defend through the European Convention. The United Kingdom is rightly applauded for supporting Ukraine with weapons and military training. But wars are ultimately won, or lost, in hearts and minds. To withdraw from the Convention would materially diminish our solidarity with those citizens – whether of Ukraine, Georgia or the Baltic Republics – who know what it is like to be deprived of its protections and who stand on the front line of freedom.

Near the end of his speech, Tim Eicke quoted from a speech made in 1949 by one of the architects of the Convention, the lawyer and French resistance fighter Pierre-Henri Teitgen:

“Democracies do not become Nazi countries in one day. Evil progresses cunningly, with a minority operating, as it were, to remove the levers of control. One by one freedoms are supressed, in one sphere after another. Public opinion and the entire national conscience are asphyxiated … It is necessary to intervene before it is too late.”

Teitgen knew of what he spoke. He understood that as the writer Iris Murdoch once put it, we can pass in a second from the time when it is too early to struggle to the time when it is too late to struggle. His warning is as pertinent as on the day it was delivered – in the old continent and in the new world too.

In difficult times, the people of Northern Ireland are fortunate that the Human Rights Commission has their back. Congratulations to all of you on the year’s work, and I wish you continued strength and courage for the future.

/END

[1] e.g. Bouyid v Belgium (GC, 2015).

[2] e.g. Sanchez-Sanchez v UK (GC, 2021).

[3] See Brazil v Gomez de Brito (2024) and Brazil v Dos Santos (2024), each applying the Convention case law on prison conditions as summarised by the Divisional Court in Elashmawy [2015] EWHC 28 (Admin).

Lord Anderson of Ipswich KBE KC