"But that’s exactly what democracy is"
Conservative Home: 30th May 2025: ConHome's Henry Hill provides a compelling argument as to why Starmer's Attorney General is simply wrong about the supremacy of international law over national democracy.
"Sir Keir Starmer’s chief legal officer has likened attempts by the Tories and Reform to pull Britain out of international courts to 1930s Nazi Germany.” ... [He says] “International law cannot and must not replace politics. As we have shown time and again as a nation, from a position of respect and compliance... reform is possible and institutions can be reformed. We must be ready to reform where necessary.”...
...It is very much the object of Lord Hermer’s species of international lawyer to replace politics – or, at the very least, to muzzle and leash it. That is precisely what the ECHR and its like are intended to do... Yet there is a crucial difference between the ECHR and the German constitution, or indeed any national constitution: there is no nation or state that correlates to it...
...Even if securing change to the constitution through political organisation is difficult, it can be done and it has been done. The ECHR is quite different. It sits above the mechanisms of political government in the nations that subscribe to it, like a modern reimagining of the medieval Church. If you profoundly disagree with the rulings of the court in Strasbourg, you could reach the very limit of what political organisation can achieve – becoming prime minister or president – and be unable to do anything about it...
...decades of mission-creep by the European Court of Human Rights et al have made the Hermerist view of the sanctity of international law – and its parity with domestic law – democratically unsupportable, because its democratic character is grossly deficient...
...Under the Hermerist concept, international law is essentially superior law, negotiated by the executive without the extensive scrutiny we apply to the passage of domestic legislation...
...Lord Hermer’s new talk of reconciling international law with democracy is a useful sign of the times, but ultimately specious, because when the two comes into conflict he in his innermost heart almost certainly thinks international law should win. As such, all the mechanisms we actually have for subjecting international law to democratic consent – i.e. our ability to legislate contrary to it – will remain, to him, beyond the pale..."