Rishi Sunak should ignore this biased Rwanda Bill report

‘UK’s Rwanda Bill incompatible with human rights obligations… damning report by MPs warns.’ So ran the headline yesterday morning, referring to the report released by the joint human rights select committee on the Safety of Rwanda Bill. As often happens, however, immediate appearances can deceive.

The striking feature of this report is that, even though it came from a select committee, it could have been penned by Amnesty International or another similar radical human rights pressure group.

The ECHR and other human rights treaties, it insists, must be followed at all costs and to the letter. What about the increasingly plausible suggestion that Strasbourg judges, captured by a progressive and at times anti-democratic establishment, have interpreted the convention in a way that would have been unrecognisable when we signed it in 1951? That, apparently, is an antediluvian ‘originalist’ fantasy, to be rejected out of hand.