Editorial: Hilary Benn is wrong - Northern Ireland can and should quit the European Convention on Human Rights

​Hilary Benn has said that Northern Ireland must “never, ever” leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

The Northern Ireland secretary did not quite put it like that when he spoke at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool. Mr Benn instead used those categorical words with regard to never walking away from the 1998 Belfast Agreement, but in doing so he conflated that deal with membership of the disastrous ECHR. He described Nigel Farage’s plan to quit the latter as “reckless”.

Praising the Belfast Agreement – a deal that this newspaper supported, alongside hundreds of thousands of unionists – Mr Benn then made a leap of logic: “[Farage] wants to undermine the Good Friday Agreement by walking away from the European Convention on Human Rights. And after all that the people of Northern Ireland have been through ... we’ve got to make sure it never, ever happens.”

It is fair to say that in 1998 there was an assumption that the UK would stay within the EU and remain a signatory to the ECHR. But in 2016 the EU was too dogmatic to give Britain a deal that might have kept us within that community. And the huge problems with the ECHR only became obvious over the last decade.

The loss of border control is not just something that the UK has experienced, but other nations in Europe, many of whom want radical overhaul of a document that can be used by activist judges and human rights extremists not only to prevent immigration barriers but to constrain our ability to combat terrorists. It is NI, above all, that knows the flaws of the ECHR, article two of which is cited to justify legacy processes that chase the security forces while terrorists escape scrutiny.

Mr Benn has implied that the Belfast Agreement is set in stone. Yet cross community safeguards were swiftly dropped to placate nationalist grievance and impose the Irish Sea border .