Farage wants us out of the ECHR. Here is what that actually means.
Nigel Farage and Reform UK want the UK to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). They sell it as a quick fix for immigration. The truth is much, much bigger than that.
Let me lay it out in plain English.
First – it is NOT an EU thing
This is the trick. Reform UK relies on people not knowing the difference. The ECHR is NOT an EU institution.
The ECHR was written in 1950. The UK helped draft it. The lead British author was a Conservative MP, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe. Winston Churchill himself called for it after the Second World War. The UK signed up in 1951 — that is 74 years ago, long before we joined the EU.
It belongs to the Council of Europe — 46 countries including Norway, Switzerland, Ukraine and Turkey. The only European countries that have left it are Russia (kicked out in 2022) and Belarus. That is the company we would be keeping.
What the ECHR actually does in real life
This is the bit nobody tells you. The ECHR is not a list of abstract foreign rules. It is part of UK law, used in UK courts, by British judges, every single day. It has been used by:
- The families of the Hillsborough victims
- The survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire
- The wrongly accused subpostmasters in the Post Office scandal
- The Windrush generation wrongfully deported by the Home Office
- Survivors of domestic abuse seeking protection
- Families challenging NHS and social care failings
- Disabled people challenging unfair benefit decisions
- Journalists targeted by the state
- LGBTQ+ people fighting for equal treatment
- Victims of state surveillance
Every single one of those used the ECHR. If we leave it, every one of those protections would have to be replaced — and Reform UK has not said with what.
[Editor’s comment: you may not see yourself covered by that list, but things change. Don’t wait to find out what the ECHR could have done for you if Reform had not got their way! It pays to know your rights so here they are: https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/your-rights/]
So why does Farage want out?
Almost entirely because of immigration. Specifically because the European Court in Strasbourg blocked the Tories’ Rwanda flights in 2022.
His pitch is: leave the ECHR, deport whoever we like, problem solved.
Now here is the awkward bit, which Reform UK never mentions:
The reality: leaving would barely change immigration
The Rwanda scheme was not just blocked by the European Court. It was ALSO ruled unlawful by the UK Supreme Court — under British law. Even the Conservative-leaning Centre for Policy Studies has concluded that leaving the ECHR would have a “marginal” effect on actual deportation numbers.
Why? Because the UK is also bound by:
- The 1951 UN Refugee Convention (which Britain helped write).
- The UN Convention Against Torture.
- Several other international agreements that ban returning people to places where they would be killed or tortured.
So we would pay a huge price and get almost nothing in return on the thing Reform claims it is about.
What we would actually lose:
Here is what leaving the ECHR would really do.
1. It would tear up the Good Friday Agreement
The 1998 peace deal that ended 30 years of bloodshed in Northern Ireland — known as the Troubles — explicitly requires the UK to keep the ECHR in Northern Irish law. It is built into the Agreement.
Leave the ECHR and you break the Good Friday Agreement. That is not my opinion. It is the warning given by Sir John Major, Sir Tony Blair AND former US President Bill Clinton — all the people who actually built that peace settlement.
The likely results: political crisis in Northern Ireland, a much stronger case for a border poll on Irish reunification, and a fight with both Dublin and Washington.
2. We would lose our policing cooperation across Europe
Boris Johnson’s own Brexit deal — the Trade and Cooperation Agreement of 2020 — says clearly that the UK’s access to European policing tools depends on staying in the ECHR.
Leave the ECHR and we lose:
- The European Arrest Warrant, which has brought over 12,000 wanted criminals back to the UK since 2004 (Home Office figures).
- Access to EU criminal databases including Europol’s intelligence sharing.
- Joint operations against people-traffickers, drug gangs and terrorists.
Senior UK police officers have repeatedly warned this would set British policing back decades. Yes — the same Reform UK that talks endlessly about “law and order” wants to throw away the single biggest piece of cross-border crime-fighting infrastructure we have.
3. UK courts would lose tools they use every day
The Human Rights Act 1998 brought the ECHR into UK law. UK judges, in UK courts, apply it constantly — for ordinary British people, not for asylum seekers. Repeal the Act and every one of those domestic protections vanishes overnight, unless something replaces it. Reform has not said what.
4. Our international standing would collapse
The UK lecturing China, Russia or Iran on human rights would become a joke. “You’ve left your own human rights system — why should we listen to you?” The minute we leave, that question is unanswerable.
5. The legal and economic hit
UK legal services are worth around £35bn a year to the British economy. They depend on the UK being seen as a stable, rule-of-law country. Walking away from a 75-year-old human rights system signals legal instability. Investors notice. So do international clients.
Who else supports leaving?
- Reform UK (official policy)
- Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman, defectors from the Conservative Party
- A handful of right-wing think tanks
Who opposes it?
- The Labour Government
- The Liberal Democrats, Greens, SNP, Plaid Cymru
- The Law Society and the Bar Council
- Most senior UK judges
- Former Conservative Prime Ministers David Cameron and Theresa May
- The Equality and Human Rights Commission
- Liberty, Amnesty UK, JUSTICE, the Howard League
- The Council of Europe, the European Commission, the US State Department
That is not a “lefty lawyers” list. That is the legal and political mainstream of the entire Western world.
The bottom line
The ECHR was built by people — many of them British — who had just lived through the Second World War. They had seen what happens when a country hands its government unlimited power over its own citizens. They wrote the Convention specifically to make sure it could never happen again.
Leaving it would:
- Tear up the Northern Ireland peace deal
- Cripple UK policing co-operation with Europe
- Strip protections from British citizens — Hillsborough families, Grenfell families, Windrush victims, domestic abuse survivors, disabled people, journalists
- Place us alongside Russia and Belarus as the only European countries outside the system
- Damage our international standing
- Hit our legal services economy
- And barely change immigration numbers at all
Reform UK is selling us a small immigration win in exchange for ripping out the legal foundations of British civil liberty. It is a terrible deal.
It would also be the second time in a decade we walked away from something Britain itself created, on the promise it would fix immigration — and then watched immigration carry on regardless.
