Johnson: Britain should have referendum on membership to the ECHR

Britain should hold a referendum on its membership to the European Convention of Human Rights, Boris Johnson said last night.

The UK’s membership to the ECHR has become a frontline issue in the Tory leadership race.

Now the former prime minister has weighed in, saying there is a ‘strong case’ for holding a referendum on the nation’s membership.

Critics of the ECHR say it has limited the UK’s immigration policy, particularly in regard to the small-boats crisis.

Mr Johnson said the ECHR did not ‘provide people with protections that they wouldn’t otherwise have’.

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Asked if he would support a referendum on ECHR membership, he told The Daily Telegraph: ‘It has become much more legally adventurist. It’s trying to second-guess what national jurisdiction should do. There’s a strong case for a proper referendum, a proper discussion about it, because I’m not certain that it actually provides people with protections that they wouldn’t otherwise have.’

Mr Johnson says he agreed with the assessment of Lord Sumption, the former Supreme Court judge, who wrote a magazine article last year arguing that human rights are well protected by UK domestic laws and the convention ‘makes us accept rights which we may not want and for which there is maybe no democratic mandate’.

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Sir James Fawcett, Mr Johnson’s maternal grandfather, was president of the ECHR. He said matters had ‘really changed since my grandfather was president’.

Mr Johnson does not intend to endorse any of the Tory leadership candidates and has not said which of them he might vote for when the membership has its say, but his comments on the ECHR will be seen as a boost to Robert Jenrick’s campaign.

The former immigration minister is the only candidate who has said he would take Britain out of the ECHR if he became prime minister.

Mr Johnson also said Russia would not have invaded Ukraine if Donald Trump had been US president. His comments come ahead of the release of his new book Unleashed on October 10.

The memoir, which was serialised in the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday last week, makes key revelations about his time in No 10.

Among his claims, Mr Johnson said he considered invading the Netherlands in a plan to seize Covid vaccines at the height of the pandemic. He claimed to have commissioned the Armed Forces to evaluate whether a raid on a warehouse in Leiden that housed five million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine was tenable. He considered the invasion under the belief the vaccines belonged to Britain after being developed here.

The former PM also said he was a part of a last-minute attempt to encourage the Duke of Sussex to stay in the UK. Mr Johnson said he delivered a ‘manly pep talk’ to Prince Harry, which was ‘totally hopeless’.

The former PM also claimed that the Conservative Party would have been victorious in the July election if he had remained as leader.