Keir Starmer knows exactly how to speed up migrant deportations

Keir Starmer literally wrote the textbook on human rights law. His European Human Rights Law: The Human Rights Act 1998 and the European Convention on Human Rights was published in 1999.

Twenty-six years later, he is rewriting his own book as prime minister. Two weeks after taking office last year, he told fellow European leaders: “We will never withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights.” He said that his new government approached the issue of migration “with humanity, and with a profound respect for international law”.

But something happens to prime ministers after they have been in office for a bit longer than two weeks.

Tony Blair, for example, was responsible for the Human Rights Act that was the subject of Starmer’s book. He went along with the civil liberties hoopla about “bringing rights home” and was briefly proud of Labour’s achievement in making it easier for citizens to gain access to their ECHR rights in British courts.

It was not long, though, before he was chafing at the restrictions that this imposed on his government’s ability to deport people convicted of serious offences because they faced the danger of torture in their home country. And Blair ended his decade as prime minister being defeated in the House of Commons for the first time on a bill to allow terrorist suspects to be detained without charge for 90 days.

Now Starmer seems to be going through a similar trajectory, although in a shorter time.

In one of his post-conference interviews, with the BBC, he said, “We need to look again at the interpretation” of articles 3 and 8 of the ECHR – the right to protection from torture, and the right to private and family life.

He insisted that he did not want to “tear down” those provisions of the ECHR, but that they had to be “applied in the circumstances as they are now”, because countries are experiencing “mass migration in a way that we have not seen in previous years”.

So far, so tentative. Yvette Cooper, as home secretary, had already announced a review of the way the ECHR is interpreted by British courts, and Shabana Mahmood, her successor, is not going to be shy about bringing in legislation to amend the Human Rights Act and tell judges what the government thinks the right to family life means.

It will not include, for example, a child’s preference for British chicken nuggets – although the conclusion of that case, which has achieved the status of urban legend, was that the deportation was allowed when the Home Office appealed.

But the significance of Starmer’s BBC interview was that he went much further than simply trying to narrow the courts’ interpretation of European Convention rights.

“It’s more than that,” he said, referring specifically to the UN Refugee Convention, Torture Convention and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. This suggests that some serious work is now being done on the real legal obstacles to secure borders.

As every wannabe Starmer – every ambitious lawyer specialising in human rights law – has pointed out, the ECHR is not what is frustrating the government’s attempts to stop the boats. The number of appeals against deportation on article 3 and article 8 grounds is small. The bigger problem is the definition of a refugee in the Refugee Convention, with two-thirds of people arriving by small boat qualifying for it.

Again, Starmer is not proposing to withdraw from that treaty, but he knows that nations have a lot of scope for interpreting it. Whoever is doing the research for his rewriting of the law has noticed that other countries have a much higher refusal rate for asylum applications than Britain and none of them has been hauled before the International Court of Justice as a result.

So it may be that a dramatic change can be achieved by changing British law alone – and who better to oversee this legal revolution than the author of the definitive book about incorporating international human rights law in domestic legislation? And his friend and fellow right-on human rights lawyer, Richard Hermer, the attorney general?

Starmer’s 1999 book has one one-star rating on the Goodreads website. He must hope that his rewriting of the British law on human rights gains better reviews than that.