A tweet worth remembering when it comes to future debates about the enforcement of immigration, asylum and social welfare law.
Caring for your wife and child is not a crime
Colm O'Cinneide
30.3K posts
Colm O'Cinneide
@colmocinneide
Irishman in London, Professor of Constitutional and Human Rights Law at UCL. RTs not endorsements, likes may be just nota bene.
London
Joined April 2013
- A UK university recently refused to send on a copy of a PhD that I'm examining until they saw a scan of my passport to confirm UK work eligibility. Such strict vigilance - all being deployed to deter irregular migrants living off the proceeds of illicit PhD examining...
- Do you get to invoke the international law defence of necessity if your policy choices are the source of the original problem - and you voluntarily agreed to the specific treaty solution you are now attempting to wriggle out of? Asking for a friend.
- I agree. My exceptional bravery in moving to the UK with my shaky command of the local vernacular isn't nearly appreciated enough...
- I note Jonathan Sumption's ECHR piece doesn't mention Northern Ireland once. Pro-withdrawal pieces usually never do. This matters for two reasons. (a) There is at times a dishonest evasiveness about the potential political & rule of law costs of ECHR denunciation. And 1/2
- Definition of happiness = my severely autistic son being back in a swimming pool for the first time in too long.
- The whole affair is squalid. As have been the systemic attempts by various media and political actors to deflect the narrative away from Boris Johnson's ultimate & overarching responsibility, owned both to Parliament and to the public at large.
- So the Good Friday Agreement is of sufficient 'primordial importance' (an exciting new international law concept) to justify shredding the NI Protocol, but not sufficiently primordial to warrant avoiding a super-hard Brexit and thus causing the tensions in the first place?
- The living instrument approach (i) was anticipated in the ECHR travaux preparatoire, & (ii) adopted by the Court 20+ years before the UK voluntarily accepted the permanent jurisdiction of the Court, encouraging other states to do likewise. But it seems we're ignoring all that.The ECHR is not the ECHR of Churchill and Attlee. By declaring the Convention a 'living instrument', the Court has extended its reach into areas undreamed of by its founders - and in a way which is utterly democratically unaccountable. unherd.com/2023/08/the-ca…
- Replying to @colmocinneideNorthern Ireland complicates (putting it mildly) all the Sumption-style narratives about the UK's historic human rights record & how it doesn't benefit from an external rights protective mechanism like the ECHR. So, again, it is striking he & others just don't engage on this. 2/2
- Given the tone of the Brexit debate, and the way in the UK government has mishandled the Article 50 process over the last two years, I'm not sure anyone in the rest of Europe is going to think this is their problem.
- Well said. Threatening employment status in response to reasoned, good faith arguments is indeed a disgraceful tactic. (And I say that as someone who has a generally different take on many of the equality law arguments specifically at issue here.)
- Anyone who knows anything about Gibraltar/Spain knew Brexit would cause real problems. 96% of Gibraltarians voted Remain for a reason.
