Of the roughly 50,000 cases currently before the European Court of Human Rights, only around 1.5% concern migration. Yet over 27 European states pushed to curb the Court’s powers in the name of migration control.
13 April 2026. Europe’s human rights system was built in the aftermath of the Second World War, in the shadow of devastation and mass displacement. At its centre stands the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights (the Court): a last resort for individuals seeking justice when their own state has violated their rights. For 75 years, the Court has done what courts are meant to do: applied the law, interpreted it to reflect new realities and held governments to account for violating it.
Now, governments across Europe are trying to cut it down.
What began last year with a letter led by Italy and Denmark, signed by nine states accusing the Court of protecting the “wrong people” – migrants – has since grown into a coalition of 27 Council of Europe member states. Last December, those states issued a joint statement repeating claims of judicial “overreach” and launching a process aimed at translating them into an official position. Tomorrow and Friday, at a ministerial conference in Chișinău, Moldova, European ministers are expected to adopt a Political Declaration shaped by those demands. For the first time since the Convention was ratified, Europe may formally move towards lowering human rights protections, contrary to its international obligations.
This is not a response to legal reality. Migration cases make up only a tiny fraction of the Court’s caseload. The claim that Strasbourg is preventing governments from effectively “managing” migration is political fiction. The fact that some of the countries in Europe that take in the most refugees - France, Germany, Spain, Turkey - are the ones that have spoken out in defence of the Convention speaks for itself.
Yet, several governments have chosen to lend credibility to that fiction, apparently calculating that by endorsing this process, they can neutralise attacks and, in some cases - such as in the UK - blunt calls to withdraw from the Convention altogether. But this is a profound mistake. When governments validate the claim that the Court is the problem, they do not contain populism; they strengthen it. They reinforce the false idea that human rights law is an obstacle to national security, that the Convention is a foreign constraint to states’ sovereignty, and that the Court is an enemy to be tamed or removed. And once that argument is conceded, it rarely stops where intended.
The immediate target may be migrants. But the principle at stake is universal. The question is whether Europe will accept different levels of protection for different categories of people. It is also whether the Court retains exclusive authority to apply and interpret the Convention, or whether governments can reshape rights at their whim.
Among the rights whose interpretation some states now want “adjusted” is Article 3 of the Convention: the absolute prohibition of torture and inhuman or degrading treatment. Absolute rights exist precisely for hard cases; once exceptions begin, the legal and moral line begins to move. The UN Commitee Against Torture has alread raised concerns in its recent assessment of Italy, one of the nine states, that the approach pursued risked suggesting the absolute ban on torture should be subject to some sort of proportionality assessment. In the UK, to name another, any weakening of Article 3 could have consequences far beyond migration, including in Northern Ireland legacy cases, affecting torture victims’ ability to seek justice under the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.
This assault on the Convention comes at a moment when multilateral institutions everywhere are under strain. The United States is undermining the United Nations and openly confronting the International Criminal Court. Across Europe and beyond, governments increasingly challenge international obligations and the mechanisms meant to enforce them. The attack on the ECHR is part of that wider unravelling. It breaks a nearly eight-decade taboo: the post-war consensus that Europe’s peace and stability depend on law restraining power.
The states driving this process argue that migration is a “new” challenge unforeseen in 1950. But what was Europe in 1950? A continent shattered by war. Forty million people displaced. Cities in ruins. Food rationing still in place. The Convention was not drafted in an age of comfort. It was drafted in the shadow of catastrophe and was specifically designed to prevent history from repeating itself.
Today, Europe remains, by global standards, prosperous and stable. The real crises facing its citizens - economic insecurity, the rising cost of living, decreasing trust in institutions – will not be solved by weakening human rights protections. If anything, the rule of law strengthens public order, it does not threaten it. Europe’s nations should remember why the Convention was written and reaffirm their commitment to respect and uphold it, rather than paving the way for exceptions that risk undermining the entire system, already exposed to multiple threats from both outside and within Europe. These next two days in Chisinau, European states must decide what they are defending: a legal order built from the ashes of Europe’s darkest years, or the dangerous illusion that rights can be weakened for some without being lost for all.
