By American Renaissance | Created at 2024-12-19 01:37:16 | Updated at 2024-12-19 04:02:32
2 hours ago
Could Germany leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) before Britain? That was the possibility raised by Jens Spahn, a senior member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), who are predicted to be the largest party after the next German election.
A former minister under Angela Merkel, Spahn is widely expected to return to the cabinet in the next German government. His statement demonstrates the huge change which has taken place in the CDU since it was led by Merkel, who infamously invited Syrian refugees to come to Germany in 2015, sparking a European migrant crisis which has never really ended.
Her opening of Germany’s borders ended in disaster. Within the year 1.3 million people had come to Europe to claim asylum, trailing across the countryside in winding columns. That led some European governments, like Hungary, to start building walls.
Despite claims that these refugees might rescue an ageing continent, as of 2021 only 54 per cent of the 890,000 who arrived in 2015 have jobs. Although Syrian refugees have made contributions in some areas, such as the 10,000 who work in German hospitals, they also feature regularly in newspapers as the perpetrators of horrific crimes, like the terror attack this year in Solingen, in which a Syrian Islamist with a knife murdered three people.
With over one million Ukrainian refugees also having arrived in recent years, Germany has seen spending on refugees, welfare payments to foreigners, and housing costs soar. That has made immigration the number two issue in polls just below the economy and contributed to a series of state-level election victories for Alternative for Germany (AfD), the hard-Right party who have made opposition to mass immigration a key part of their platform.
Nor is the crisis ending. Germany received 236,400 asylum applications this year alone and 71,000 illegal border crossings. In many areas the refugee centres set up in 2015 have been reopened for new arrivals. As the German economy sputters under the cost of high energy prices and the number of layoffs increases, with Bosch being the latest to cut nearly 10,000 jobs, the voters have had enough.
Desperate to win votes away from the AfD, leader of the CDU, Friedrich Merz, has called for a national emergency to be declared so that asylum seekers can be turned back at the border. The current, deeply unpopular, coalition government led by the left-wing Social Democratic Party (SPD) has tried to head off the issue, by reimposing border controls. But when investigative journalists from the online outlet NIUS went to investigate, they found nobody guarding the borders.
Over the years, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, where ECHR cases are heard, has expanded the definition of asylum to the point where it makes controlling borders an impossibility. Many asylum seekers can rely on Article 3, which prohibits degrading treatment, to stay in Germany, arguing that they will face poor treatment at home. Those who stay long enough can rely on Article 8, which means that even criminals can avoid deportation if they can argue that it would hurt their family. That’s one reason why less than a third of migrants who are ordered to leave the EU actually do so.
The ECHR, which was drawn up in the aftermath of the Second World War, was made for a world which no longer exists, before our current world of easy travel and mass migration. That has been worsened by judges in Strasbourg, who have consciously increased the scope of the law, most recently seeking to overturn a referendum in Switzerland on climate change. European politicians, confronted by a never-ending asylum crisis and voters angry about it, are realising that their power to stop it has been usurped by these international judges.
That’s why there is an appetite for tackling the ECHR, with Poland, Denmark, Italy, and Austria all expressing deep frustration with it. Reforming the ECHR means amending the text however, which requires the agreement of all 46 members and will be near-impossible to get. Britain attempted a renegotiation in 2012 but achieved little. As Germany is a member of the EU, a similar danger is presented by the EU’s current attempt to accede to the ECHR, so that the ECHR will apply to its decisions as well as to those of member states. After years of negotiation, a provisional agreement was reached in 2023. If it does happen, it will make it even harder to reform or leave.
Nonetheless, the fact that German politicians, in the country which previously had the most liberal asylum policies in Europe, are saying this, shows how far the debate has shifted. Whether the next German government really will do this or only wants to block off the threat of the AfD before the election, the option is on the table and the genie is out of the bottle. Any failure to control asylum will make it an ever more pressing argument.
In Britain, the Government have recommitted to supporting the ECHR, leaving them at the mercy of the courts and frustrating their efforts to end the small boats crisis. All eyes will therefore turn to the opposition, to see if they are willing to commit to the measures necessary to restore Britain’s borders. As Brexit showed, democracy requires national sovereignty. So long as foreign judges have the final say on control of our borders, the problem won’t go away – and if we don’t lead the way, others in Europe are preparing to.
