It’s time to rip up outdated refugee convention
Much discussion around how to stop the illegal migrant traffic across the Channel has centred upon the rule of human rights law in preventing Britain from getting to grips with the problem. There’s another elephant in this particular room, however, and that’s the international law governing refugees.
In a speech in the House of Lords, amplified on Joshua Rozenberg’s A Lawyer Talks podcast (full disclosure: said podcaster is m’learned husband) the former director of public prosecutions Lord Macdonald of River Glaven made the case that reforming refugee law was pivotal to tackling the issue.
His concern was that the current scale of mass migration and the organised crime gangs profiting from it are weakening faith in democratic institutions, driving populist politics across Europe and the rise of authoritarian governments.
That much is a not unfamiliar concern. But Macdonald’s most striking observations were about refugee law. The Refugee Convention of 1951 defines a refugee as someone with a well- founded fear of persecution in their home country and who must not be sent back to face serious threats to their life or freedom.
This convention was created after the Holocaust in response to the fact that virtually every country denied entry to the Jews trying to flee Nazi Germany. In 1967, the convention was broadened to encompass refugees from all countries.
As Macdonald observed, the world was a very different place when the convention was enacted. In 1951, there were an estimated 2.1 million refugees under the mandate of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In 2024, according to the UNHCR, there were no fewer than 122.6 million internally displaced persons around the world and no fewer than 43.7 million refugees. These numbers are increasing all the time.
"In 1967, the convention broadened to refugees from every country
In addition, the world has become a lot smaller thanks to international travel and the fact that, through the spread of information, people in developing nations are now well aware of what developed countries can offer them.
So talk about smashing the human trafficking gangs, said Macdonald, was pointless. Globally, tens or even hundreds of millions of people could claim asylum status. Why wouldn’t they use criminal gangs to get them to some unimaginably rich country? Why wouldn’t these vast numbers not seek better lives or escape from violence and oppression?
But these numbers are now putting a strain on developed countries that is simply insupportable and was unimaginable in 1951.
It takes courage to say this. Macdonald belongs to the centre left, where it’s an article of faith that mass immigration is the route to establishing the brotherhood of man through multiculturalism and the consequent erosion of white, oppressive western identity. Anyone opposing this is said to be a fascist, everyone claiming refugee status must be believed and if people are fleeing only economic hardship that’s a good enough reason to admit them.
To illustrate the point, Macdonald referred to the Columbia University professor Mark Lilla. In his 2016 book The Once and Future Liberal, he wrote that centre-left parties promoting identity politics would never be able to create winning electoral coalitions.
Instead they would alienate the left’s natural supporters and usher in an age of populism. For this prescience, Lilla was labelled a white supremacist by some of his university colleagues.
If the crisis of mass migration hinges on refugee law, what role is played by the European Convention on Human Rights, which Reform is committed to leave in order to deal with the issue, and over which the Tories are agonising?
The ECHR is separate from the refugee convention but lends its support to the right of refugees to avoid being killed or persecuted through its articles upholding the right to life, prohibiting torture, inhuman or degrading treatment and providing the right to family life. Critics believe the courts’ expansive interpretation of these provisions has stymied the government’s ability to control the number of migrants claiming the right to live in Britain.
Macdonald thinks this complaint can be addressed by reforms to the ECHR that are now being considered by member states that are facing the same crisis over mass migration. And rather than leave the refugee convention, he suggests that countries should agree refugee quotas among themselves.
The issue needed to be gripped by a centre-left government, he said, because centre-left politics were particularly threatened by the rising threat of populist politics.
He was obviously thinking of the rise of Reform. Although that also threatens the Tories, it was the Labour governments under Blair and Brown that deliberately encouraged mass immigration in accordance with the multicultural shibboleths of the left.
So although the Tories won’t be forgiven for having gone along with this, it’s Labour that has abandoned its core constituency of working-class people, who feel passionately that they are now “strangers” in their own country — and who will abandon Labour unless this crisis is ended.
Macdonald has spoken aloud something that his colleagues on the centre left refuse to acknowledge. He should be saluted for such bravery and clarity of thought.
He appears to believe, however, that both the refugee convention and the ECHR can be reformed rather than junked in order to deal with the issue.
That, though, may be yet more of the wishful thinking that now poses an existential threat to the left from which it is incapable of finding refuge.
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