The Conservative Party has unveiled a package of immigration proposals designed to remove judicial oversight from asylum and immigration decisions. Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp announced plans to abolish immigration tribunals, the specialized courts that currently handle appeals against Home Office immigration decisions. Party leader Kemi Badenoch separately announced a formal commission to investigate whether international human rights agreements constrain British immigration policy.

The proposals target two separate legal pathways. First, the party wants to change the law so the Human Rights Act no longer applies to immigration cases. This would prevent people facing removal from invoking human rights protections in UK courts. Second, scrapping immigration tribunals would eliminate the independent appellate layer that currently reviews Home Office decisions before they take effect.

The Legal Architecture

The Human Rights Act 1998 brought the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) into British law. It allows people facing removal to challenge Home Office decisions on human rights grounds without petitioning Strasbourg directly. These cases typically rest on Articles 3 (prohibition of torture and inhuman treatment), 5 (liberty), and 8 (right to private and family life).

Removing the HRA from immigration cases wouldn't formally withdraw Britain from the Convention, but it would eliminate that domestic route. Claimants would have to pursue the lengthier process of appealing to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg—a slower, more expensive procedure.

The tribunal tier handles hundreds of thousands of appeals annually through the First-tier Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber) and the Upper Tribunal. Abolishing these courts would concentrate decision-making in the Home Office, with no independent review unless Parliament created a replacement mechanism—something the Conservative Party has not yet detailed.

The Badenoch commission probes deeper. A formal inquiry into how the ECHR constrains British law signals potential future arguments for withdrawal, even if current proposals stop short of that. Conservative positioning on the Convention has shifted in stages: from proposing a British Bill of Rights, to the Rwanda Act's statutory declaration that Rwanda was safe, to now questioning the Convention's reach over immigration policy.

The Practical and Political Stakes

Britain's relationship with the ECHR has been contested since the Human Rights Act's passage. The previous government's Rwanda scheme—a flagship attempt to restart removals—collapsed after both UK and Strasbourg courts found Convention-based objections held. That judicial intervention sharpened Conservative frustration with human rights law.

For immigration lawyers, caseworkers, and asylum organizations, the practical implications are substantial. Tribunals currently catch a measurable proportion of wrongly decided Home Office refusals—a check that critics of the proposals worry would vanish. Proponents of abolition argue instead that the system is exploited to delay removals that are ultimately lawful.

The commission could also raise questions about Britain's relationship with broader treaty frameworks, including the 1951 Refugee Convention, though the announced proposals do not explicitly target it.

These remain opposition proposals. Labour holds a strong Commons majority and has not signaled support for this approach. The value of the announcement lies in clarifying Conservative thinking before the next election cycle, and in pressing Labour to defend the existing legal structure in language the public grasps.

Whether a future Conservative government would have both the parliamentary numbers and diplomatic room to implement these changes—particularly the HRA carve-out, which would face intense scrutiny from devolved legislatures and the legal profession—remains genuinely unclear. The party has not yet laid out that case in detail.