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Shabana Mahmood, the Labour shadow justice secretary, has defended the UK’s membership of the European Court of Human Rights, describing it as a privilege that has “protected the rights of thousands of British citizens” over the years.
Mahmood said people might not agree with all ECHR judgments but argued it would be hard to disagree with the “overall picture” that membership had given Britain enormous benefits, including underpinning the Good Friday Agreement at the heart of the Northern Ireland peace accord.
It also played a crucial role in lifting the ban on gay people serving in the armed forces and overturned an injunction preventing the press reporting of the thalidomide scandal in 1979, she added.
Some Conservative MPs have advocated departure from the European Convention on Human Rights, saying this would enable the faster deportation of asylum seekers crossing the English Channel in small boats.
But Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is widely expected to use the Tories’ election manifesto to advocate reform of the ECHR rather than an outright exit. In contrast, former cabinet minister Robert Jenrick last week became the latest MP to advocate leaving the ECHR, claiming any attempt at negotiation was “doomed to fail”.
“The Tories are clearly deeply split. The ECHR has now become the next frontier in their internal civil war. And that’s a damning indictment of their own lack of ideas,” Mahmood told the Financial Times.
She said a future Labour government would continue to support the ECHR. “How would leaving actually make life better? Is this just another group of people for the Tories to blame for their complete ineffectiveness over 14 years?”
Mahmood was speaking ahead of her first speech as shadow justice secretary on Monday evening, in which she will promise to champion Britain’s legal services industry through a “renewed partnership” with the sector.
The MP for Birmingham Ladywood, an influential figure in Sir Keir Starmer’s shadow cabinet, will also come to the defence of judges, warning that the independence of the courts has been “severely tested, if not broken”, in recent years.
“We have had leaders who are willing to publicly disparage the law, our judges and the courts,” she will say.
She will highlight the fines imposed on ministers for Covid lockdown breaches and attack the government for deliberately breaking international law in a “specific and limited way” in 2020 in relation to a Brexit treaty.
“The link between Labour and the law is forged in steel,” she will say, pointing out that as well as Starmer, the party has a number of lawyers as leaders in the past, including Clement Attlee and Sir Tony Blair.
The Conservative party is trying to weaponise Starmer’s record before he went into politics as a human rights lawyer, whose work included defending killers in various countries on death row. The Tories have also attacked him over the handling of the case of sexual predator Jimmy Savile by the Crown Prosecution Service when Starmer was director of public prosecutions.
“Like every lawyer Keir was subject to the cab rank rule which means when a case comes along in your areas of expertise you take it,” said Mahmood. “Criticism of that is a cheapening of our political discourse by people whose ranks include senior lawyers . . . if this is where the Tories think they can win a general election then bring it on.”
She described criticism of Starmer over Savile as “desperate tactics from people fast running out of road” given he was not the reviewing lawyer for the case. “Not all cases come before the DPP.”
Mahmood will face difficult spending constraints as justice secretary if Labour wins the general election later this year. “Change will not happen overnight,” she will say in Monday’s speech. “We cannot wave a magic wand and return our legal system to its former glory.”
One of her first priorities will be tackling the desperate squeeze on Britain’s prisons, which are 99 per cent full. The government has consequently released some burglars and violent criminals months early, extending end-of-custody supervised licences from 18 days to up to 60.
Key to Labour’s plans is the use of emergency planning powers to accelerate the existing programme to build 20,000 new prison places and override local council’s objections where necessary.
Labour will support some measures in the government’s sentencing bill currently progressing slowly through parliament, including whole-life orders for offences that include sexual violence or rape.
Mahmood, as the most senior Muslim Labour MP, endured a difficult period late last year as Starmer was criticised for initially refusing to back a ceasefire in Gaza, with some colleagues fearing she could quit the front bench.
She welcomed the fact Labour’s position had now changed. “It’s still of deep concern to my constituents, people are still very hurt and very angry and I understand exactly where they’re coming from because people are still dying as we speak,” she said. “Famine, if it’s not already occurring, is imminent.”
Mahmood criticised attempts to “delegitimise perfectly lawful protests” by pro-Palestinian campaigners, but added: “I would urge campaigners in this space to . . . take some of the hostility and division out of this debate . . . most of the British public wants to see a two-state solution.”