Treaty 'encourages terrorists'

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Migrationwatch, which campaigns against mass immigration, said the treaty acts as a "positive encouragement" for terrorists to come to Britain.

Human rights law should be re-written to become "appropriate to the new age of terrorism" by excluding convicted terrorists from its provisions, it said.

The group suggested the ECHR, signed by Britain in 1951 and adopted into domestic law under the Human Rights Act in 1998, allowed terrorists to remain in the UK even after serving a jail sentence.

The convention prevents the Government from deporting foreign terror suspects if they may face torture or ill-treatment in their home countries.

Migrationwatch also said the ECHR prevents the Government taking action against terror suspects on British soil, following a House of Lords ruling which ended indefinite detention without trial on human rights grounds.

A new Human Rights Act should specifically allow terrorist suspects to be detained for long periods of time, a report by the group said.

"The ECHR renders foreign terrorists safe from deportation and, in effect, provides them with a meal ticket for life," said Migrationwatch chairman Sir Andrew Green.

"It was drawn up 50 years ago in entirely different circumstances. We must now pull out of it and write our own laws to protect human rights for the majority."

Britain should give six months' notice that it will withdraw from the ECHR, said Migrationwatch, and make a public announcement that any foreigner arrested and convicted of a terrorist offence will be deported to his or her home country at the end of their sentence. A right of appeal against deportation would only be exercised after departure, it added.