LONDON: Prime Minister Keir Starmer vowed in an interview aired Wednesday to review how UK courts interpret international human rights laws as he bids to curb immigration levels and deport more migrants.
Starmer is battling to stem the irregular arrival of migrants in small boats across the Channel as well as the number of people coming through other regular legal channels.
Both have reached record levels in recent years, helping spur anti-immigrant sentiment and the rise of Brexit champion Nigel Farage’s hard-right Reform UK party.
Shortly after warning his center-left Labour party’s annual conference Tuesday that Britain faces a “battle for the soul of the country,” Starmer told broadcasters his government will reassess various rights protections for migrants.
“We need to look again at the interpretation of some of these provisions, and we’ve already begun to do that work in some of our domestic legislation,” he told BBC Radio.
“It’s the refugee conventions, it’s the torture conventions, it’s the convention on the rights of children.
“I’m not going to tear all that down. I believe in those instruments... but all international instruments, and this is long-established, have to be applied in the circumstances as they are now.”
The UK leader said those “genuinely fleeing persecution should be afforded asylum” but the country was “seeing mass migration in a way that we haven’t seen in previous years.”
Reform has vowed to scrap the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), while Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, favors reforming its application in Britain.
He told the BBC that Articles 3 of the ECHR — prohibiting torture, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and used by asylum seekers to stay in the UK or fight deportation — was an example.
“I do think we should look at that again,” the UK leader said.
“I think there’s a difference between someone being deported to summary execution and someone who is simply going somewhere where they don’t have the same level of health care, or... prison conditions.”
Starmer also noted that Article 8, stating “everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life,” would also be reexamined.
UK courts have interpreted it in some “exceptional circumstances” as providing the right to remain in Britain with relatives.
In a May policy paper, the government pledged new laws would “clarify” how to interpret it.
The interior ministry said in September that new legislation will reform “family immigration” rules so they are based on actions of “parliament, rather than ad hoc court decisions.”
In response to Starmer’s comments, Akiko Hart, director of rights organization Liberty, warned the approach risked “setting us on a path to undermining the rights of every person in Britain.”
UK to review how courts interpret migrants’ rights: Starmer
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UK to review how courts interpret migrants’ rights: Starmer
- Starmer is battling to stem the irregular arrival of migrants in small boats across the Channel
- “We need to look again at the interpretation of some of these provisions, and we’ve already begun to do that work in some of our domestic legislation,” he told BBC Radio
Moscow records heaviest snowfall in over 200 years
- Commuter trains in the Moscow area were delayed and cars were stuck in long traffic jams on Thursday evening
- Snow piles on the ground reached as high as 60 centimeters in some parts of the capital
MOSCOW: Russia’s capital Moscow has this month seen the largest snowfall in more than 200 years, Moscow State University meteorologists said on Thursday.
AFP images from the city of around 13 million people showed residents struggling to make their way through heavy piles of snow on the streets in its central district.
Commuter trains in the Moscow area were delayed, AFP reporters witnessed, and cars were stuck in long traffic jams on Thursday evening.
“January was a cold and unusually snowy month in Moscow,” the university said on social media.
“By January 29, the Moscow State University Meteorological Observatory had recorded almost 92 mm of precipitation, which is already the highest value in the last 203 years,” it added.
Snow piles on the ground reached as high as 60 centimeters (24 inches) in some parts of the capital on Thursday.
Snow is mostly air, meaning the level of settled snow far surpasses scientific measurements of precipitation — which measures the amount of water that has fallen.
The record snowfall was “caused by deep and extensive cyclones with sharp atmospheric fronts passing over the Moscow region,” the observatory said.
“There was much more (snow) when I was a kid, but now we practically don’t have any snow at all, there used to be much more,” Pavel, a 35-year-old bartender and Moscow resident, told AFP, grumbling about a feeling of “emptiness” in the dark, snowy winter.
Earlier this month, Russia’s far east Kamchatka region declared an emergency situation due to a massive snowstorm that left its major city partially paralyzed.
Images, widely circulated online, showed huge snow piles reaching up to the second story of buildings and people digging their way through roads as snow blanketed cars on either side.
