LONDON (Reuters) – Dominic Raab, Britain’s justice secretary and deputy prime minister, said on Thursday the European Court of Human Rights had overstepped its powers in blocking Britain’s attempt to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda this week.
“The Strasbourg court itself has said for many years that there’s no binding power of injunction. And then later on they said: ‘Well actually, we can issue such binding injunctions. It is not grounded in the Convention’,” Raab told Sky News.
Challenged over death threats on social media to human rights lawyers, Raab said they were unacceptable but Britain’s Human Rights Act had led to an “industry” of lawyers promoting “elastic interpretations” of the law on behalf of their clients.
(Reporting by Muvija M; writing by David Milliken, editing by Elizabeth Piper)