Watch out – the Tories will use their Rwanda ‘win’ to dismantle the law that protects your human rights

Ahead of what turned out to be a pivotal day for the government’s Rwanda bill, Suella Braverman made a sudden return to the front line of public life earlier this week, with a characteristically abrasive appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. It would seem that the law is, to some right wingers, what taxes were to New York’s “Queen of Mean”, Leona Helmsley: “We don’t pay taxes – only the little people pay taxes.” For people of this type, human rights are some sort of foreign intervention that need to be curtailed. So while the justice system is falling around our ears, I have no doubt that the drafters of the Conservative manifesto will still commit to the repeal of the Human Rights Act, which introduced the European Convention of Human Rights into English law, and will again promote the idea of a “British Bill of Rights”. If a British Bill of Rights follows previous blueprints, it will create a society in which not everyone is equal in their access to justice; it will mean the government can act in ways that undermine people’s rights without fear of oversight by the courts, creating a country in which the state does not owe us a duty to safeguard our rights, whether in the everyday circumstances we all experience or in the extreme situations that we hope we never will. There is also the problem that if we refuse to implement the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights, as some on the right of the Conservative Party propose, it will put us at risk of being excluded from the Council of Europe, ostracising us from another very important club of nations, which brings together 46 member states in shared purposes which extend far beyond the ECHR and include sport and shared cultural activity.