Filmed at the Battle of Ideas festival 2023, this fascinating panel do battle over the ECHR and reveal much along the way.

For many, the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), and its courts in Strasbourg, has become the focus – either as the bulwark against anti-refugee sentiment, or the block on democratic process.

In the aftermath of the Second World War the European Convention on Human Rights was seen as a protection against the tyranny and oppression that some European nations had recently endured. Nowadays, those who support it stress the importance of human rights as setting a minimum standard which democracies should guarantee. Is the problem therefore simply one of European judicial overreach, or is it essentially about the very notion of ‘human rights’ themselves? Are human rights and democratic, collective action doomed to forever be at loggerheads? With courts in Strasbourg and London ruling to impede government plans to stop small boats crossing the Channel, are human rights making popular government impossible? Or is the ECHR being scapegoated for inadequacies in our own backyard?

The speakers are:
Steven Barrett - barrister, Radcliffe Chambers; writer on law, Spectator
Jamie Burton - founder and chair, Just Fair; barrister (KC), Doughty Street Chambers; author Three Times Failed: why we need enforceable socio-economic rights
Luke Gittos - criminal lawyer; author, Human Rights – Illusory Freedom; director, Freedom Law Clinic
John Oxley - writer, New Statesman, Spectator,and UnHerd; consultant; barrister
Angelica Walker-Werth - writer, editor and programmes manager, Objective Standard Institute
The chair is: Jon Holbrook - barrister; writer, spiked, Critic, Conservative Woman

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