A UN special rapporteur says the United Kingdom risks following the lead of Nazi Germany by its possible withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
Professor François Crépeau, the UN special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, said: “We have to remember the 1930s and how the rights of the Jews were restricted in Germany and then the rights of the whole German people. I mean, countries that go down the path of reducing the rights of one category of people usually don’t stop there.”
“If you reduce the human rights protection, you reduce it for everyone. If you have a government that says, ‘well, there is too much human rights in this country, let’s reduce it’, at one point you might think it will reduce the rights of one category of persons, but it has a tendency to spill over,” the senior UN representative told the Sunday Times.
Crépeau’s comments come after the UK’s ruling Tories threatened to withdraw from the ECHR if necessary to regain the power to extradite foreign criminals.
The ECHR was introduced after the Second World War to try to prevent repeats of the kind of repression seen in Nazi Germany.