Nigel Farage Announces Plans to Repeal Human Rights Laws to Speed Up Deportations

Nigel Farage, who helms the UK’s Reform UK Party, known for its staunch anti-immigration policies, laid out a proposal on Tuesday aiming to revoke several human rights laws. He stated that this drastic measure was necessary in order to expedite the large-scale deportation of individuals seeking asylum. Farage further specified that his party aims to disentangle Britain from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), revoke the Human Rights Act, and disregard other international agreements that deter the compelled expatriation of asylum seekers. ‘We are on the brink of severe social disruption,’ Farage alerted during a media briefing, referring to the recent surge of immigration as ‘an unauthorized encroachment into our nation by young men.’

The declaration occurred amidst a series of recurring, local protests that have been conducted outside accommodations harboring asylum seekers, provoked by heightened concerns around public security. This is following incidents where certain individuals were indicted for sexual assault. It seems the topic of immigration has now surpassed the economy and evolved into the primary issue plaguing the minds of British voters, as shown by recent polling data.

The anti-immigration party Reform UK, with only four existing MPs but leading consistently in polling data for voter intentions, is imposing ever-increasing pressure on Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer to address this escalating problem. 2024 witnessed Britain inundated with a record-breaking number of 108,100 asylum applications. This represented a spike of almost a 20% increase from the preceding year. Individuals hailing from Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh constituted the majority of asylum seekers that year.

Notably, the spotlight has largely captured those individuals arriving on small-scale boats traversing the Channel, with a surge in arrivals recorded this year. Reform UK has declared that amendments to the asylum law would enable it to expel as many as 600,000 asylum seekers in its inaugural term should it emerge victorious in the forthcoming election, expected to occur by 2029.

While addressing the media, Farage queried his senior officer, Zia Yusuf, on his party’s ambitious plans. More specifically, he asked if the UK could feasibly deport between 500,000 and 600,000 individuals during its first term. Yusuf expressed his resounding agreement, stating, ‘Absolutely.’

Present and former iterations of Starmer’s government have grappled for years with navigating the issue of handling unauthorized entrants into the country. The plans proposed by Farage’s Reform UK are significantly more radical and propose striking agreements with countries like Afghanistan, Eritrea, and others to accept the return of their citizens who had entered the UK unlawfully.

In response to these suggestions, Government Minister Matthew Pennycook vocally criticized Farage’s strategies as ‘a litany of ploys’ that hold no viability. Pennycook argued that the ECHR acted as the basis for several critical international agreements, including the Good Friday Agreement, which served to halt the prolonged violence affecting Northern Ireland since the late 1960s.

When quizzed about the potential impact on the peace agreement, Farage intimated that it could be subject to renegotiations, despite acknowledging this would be a protracted process. He made these comments in the context of an Ethiopian man seeking asylum, who was facing accusations of sexual assault against a woman and a teenager, and whose recent arrest gave rise to the organization of several prominent protests.

Promoting his party’s stance on the immigration situation, Farage claimed that he was the only political leader willing to enact the decisive measures necessary to alleviate public concerns. ‘The question is,’ he said, ‘whose side are you on? Do you stand for the security of women and children on our streets, or do you choose to support obsolete international agreements upheld by questionable courts?’

Prime Minister Starmer’s administration has drawn up plans that aim to dismantle the criminal organizations responsible for human trafficking into the UK; their strategies include the overhauling of the asylum appeal process and the deployment of a greater number of enforcement officers. The preceding Conservative Government also had a deportation arrangement in the pipeline involving Rwanda as a destination for asylum seekers, but this proposal was deemed unlawful and dismissed by the UK’s highest court.