Rishi Sunak is right to challenge Europe’s human rights treaty

Rishi Sunak senses, rightly, that tough talk on the Channel migrant issue will go down well in both middle England and the Red Wall. One can see why. No small country with overstressed social provision should tolerate an annual influx of irregular migrants sufficient to populate a medium-sized town landing openly on its beaches. That they are from countries where they are in no appreciable danger, can mouth the word ‘asylum’ and then either disappear or use every intricacy of the law to stymie attempts to deport them feels intolerable to many. 

Last week Rishi floated an idea to stop this. It would subject those who arrived irregularly on our shores to automatic detention and deportation, and prevent them claiming asylum at all until they were out of the country. We have not yet seen the details, but one thing is clear: any such system would face human rights objections. The government realised this, and its answer was uncompromising: irregular migrants issuing human rights challenges to refusal of asylum would get no special treatment.