Of course, when she became Prime Minister three months later, she attempted no such thing, perhaps reasoning that leaving the EU was quite enough work for the moment. Still, the question has not gone away. The Government says that it remains committed to UK membership of the ECHR, but, as the Channel crisis continues, its commitment seems to be waning.

Earlier in the year, Rishi Sunak, was reported to be considering contesting the next election on a commitment to withdrawing from the ECHR if the European Court of Human Rights were to find his new immigration legislation incompatible with the Convention. Only this week, Robert Jenrick, the Minister for Immigration, said that the Government would do “whatever is necessary” to stop “the small boats”, clearly implying that this included withdrawal from the ECHR.

The Supreme Court will soon hear the Government’s appeal in the Rwanda litigation, and the Government may well prevail. The Court of Appeal’s recent judgment, which held that removing asylum-seekers from the UK to Rwanda would breach Article 3 of the ECHR, is open to serious question, and the Supreme Court under Lord Reed’s leadership is a much more legally disciplined institution than when he took over from Lady Hale in January 2020.

If the Government’s appeal succeeds, the litigants will proceed to the Strasbourg Court, which may eventually find against the UK. But more immediately, well in advance of any final judgment, an anonymous judge of the Court may indicate “interim measures” under Rule 39 of “The Rules of Court”, which would instruct the UK not to carry out removals until some later date.

The Strasbourg Court’s Rule 39 practice is incompatible with the text and structure of the ECHR and should be firmly rejected: the Convention confers binding force on final rulings of the Court, but not on “interim measures”. Section 55 of the Illegal Migration Act 2023 seems to recognise this, providing ministers with the power to decide whether or not to remove a person from the UK despite an “interim measure”. This is an oddly framed power, and it is a miracle that it was ever enacted. Between government lawyers and the law officers, it is very difficult for the Government even to put before Parliament legislation that the Strasbourg Court might in the end disapprove.

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This points to a wider problem with ECHR membership. The doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty provides that whatever the King-in-Parliament enacts is law. Legislative freedom is the centrepiece of the Westminster model and it is for Parliament, in conversation with the people, to decide freely what the law should be. However, membership of the ECHR and subjection to the jurisdiction of the Strasbourg Court means that Parliament’s freedom to legislate is exercised under a cloud: deliberation within Parliament is often distorted by reasoning not about the merits of proposed legislation but about its compatibility with the case law of the European Court of Human Rights. The problem has been vividly apparent in relation to the Government’s various attempts to address lawfare against UK armed forces.

Strictly, Parliament is free to enact whatever legislation it sees fit, even if this is incompatible with the UK’s international treaty obligations: it is crystal clear that legislation which is incompatible with a treaty remains valid law, which everyone, including civil servants, is obliged to obey. Still, there are very good reasons for the Government to be slow to propose, and for Parliament to be reluctant to enact, legislation that would place the UK in breach of its international obligations. The UK’s reputation matters: so too does international order.

The problem with the ECHR, then, is not that it is an international treaty. The problem is that the Court has made it into a dynamic treaty. Rather than simply upholding the terms agreed by the member states, the Strasbourg Court has, since the Seventies, said that the ECHR is a “living instrument”, the meaning of which changes as the Court decides a succession of cases and divines a changing European consensus.

Deploying this approach, the Court has remade the Convention, imposing far-reaching new obligations on states and driving its own vision for social, moral and political reform across Europe. Most strikingly, the Strasbourg Court has invented a whole new European law of immigration and asylum which has no foundation in the text. But the Court’s case law distorts legislative deliberation and government policy-making across the field, including in relation to welfare policy, social policy, penal policy, counter-terrorism, military action, housing, taxation and press freedom.

There is, as a result, a vast gap between the express terms of the ECHR and the case law that the Strasbourg Court now applies. Enthusiasts for the status quo routinely overlook this.

In a nicely executed piece of Guardian agitprop in 2016, responding to Theresa May’s call to leave the ECHR, Patrick Stewart features as a new Prime Minister railing against Europe’s assault on British sovereignty. At one point, he asks his cabinet: “What has the ECHR ever done for us in return?” Nothing, reply his ministers, apart from providing the right to fair trial, the right to privacy, freedom from torture, freedom of religion, freedom of expression, freedom from discrimination, freedom from slavery and so on.

The response is absurd because the protection of rights and freedoms in the UK long predates the ECHR — we do not owe fair trials or the abolition of slavery to the Strasbourg Court. The sketch itself recognises this when it goes on to say that the British drafted the Convention to help Europe sort itself out.

In any case, the problem is not with the terms of the ECHR, but with the Strasbourg Court’s departure from them. This is revealed by what the sketch’s writers left out. At one point, Stewart mocks David Cameron’s remark about feeling “physically ill” at the thought of introducing votes for prisoners. But the sketch does not include prisoner voting in its litany of “what the ECHR has done for us”. Nor does it mention that the Strasbourg Court invented a right to prisoner voting, a right which the member states did not intend to create.

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The UK Parliament, in response, refused to change the law to comply with the Strasbourg Court’s 2005 ruling. Yet 12 years later, the Committee of Ministers, which monitors compliance with judgments of the Strasbourg Court, gave the UK a clean bill of health — a fudge designed to obscure the fact that the UK had not changed its legislation as the Court demanded.

Principled defiance of the Strasbourg Court is therefore an option. With Parliament’s support, the Government could refuse to comply with judgments that brazenly misinterpret the text of the ECHR and thus depart from the terms that the UK, like other member states, agreed. The Supreme Court made the case for such defiance in 2015, in a judgment about the case law of the Court of Justice of the EU, which is also inclined to exceed its jurisdiction. Still, it is much easier for Parliament to refuse to amend or repeal legislation that the Strasbourg Court has denounced than for the Government to propose new legislation that it fears the Court will denounce.

Whether in relation to the Channel crisis or more generally, the Government should not use membership of the ECHR as an excuse for failing to propose legislation that in its view is necessary and justified. Rather, it should recognise that leaving the ECHR would restore Parliament’s freedom, on behalf of the British people, to decide what our laws should be. Crucially, this is not a party-political matter, even if it looks set to become one. Bringing the Strasbourg Court’s jurisdiction over the UK to an end would strengthen parliamentary democracy, regardless of which party forms a government and enjoys a majority.

The UK has left the European Union, but we remain a member of the Council of Europe. The CoE is an older and larger organisation — hence the inclusion of Russia and Turkey — and is built around the European Convention on Human Rights. This week’s meeting revealed just how empty some of those human rights have become.

The title of the resolution passed by its Parliamentary Assembly was noble enough — “Combating rising hate against LGBTI people in Europe” — but, as ever, the devil was in the detail. As well as conflating the UK, where LGB and trans people are well-protected, with the rather different situation in parts of Eastern Europe, the resolution quietly erased sex from its list of protected characteristics.

Deplorably, sex was not even mentioned in respect to refuge shelters. Victims, the CoE ruled, must be protected against “re-traumatisation on the grounds of their sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression or sex characteristics” — but not their sex.

It then got worse: the resolution further demanded that member states “refuse to provide funding to local, regional or national authorities or other State or non-State actors that deny the human rights of LGBTI people, and to withdraw such funding if it has already been granted”. This was, in effect, a call for governments to turn their backs on single-sex provision.

Let’s be clear: the LGBTI community is made up of people whose human rights deserve to be protected. But other groups also have human rights, and sometimes rights need to be balanced. When vulnerable women need single-sex provision, they must not be expected to share with members of the opposite sex, however we might identify.

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It shouldn’t be outside the realm of possibility to create additional spaces for transsexuals like me so as to assure everyone’s rights. Yes, it might cost more money — but this resolution was driven far more by ideology than economics. A whole paragraph was devoted to stamping out what its author perceived to be the “highly prejudicial anti-gender, gender-critical and anti-trans narratives which reduce the fight for the equality of LGBTI people to what these movements deliberately mis-characterise as ‘gender ideology’ or ‘LGBTI ideology’”.

It was the kind of statement trotted out in student debates — and you could be forgiven for thinking its impact will be just as small. After all, CoE Resolutions are not binding on member states, and I suspect that few Europeans care enough to know that its Parliamentary Assembly even exists, less still the business conducted by the 324 representatives drawn from national parliaments (including 18 UK members from the Commons and the Lords).

The truth, however, is that it does wield an influence over us all: when issues such as gender identity reach national parliaments, CoE resolutions allow politicians to present their case as a fait accompli. Indeed, when Maria Miller first introduced the concept of gender self-identification to the House of Commons in 2016, she cited: “Resolution 2048 of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.”

That isn’t to say that all politicians subscribe to the CoE’s transgender agenda. On Tuesday, five members of the UK delegation tabled 10 amendments in an attempt to rescue the resolution. Just three managed to find their way into the final text. The first, Amendment 11, crucially inserted the word ‘sex’ into paragraph 12.1:

“amend criminal legislation as necessary to ensure that its provisions with respect to hate crimes clearly cover all offences committed against a person or group of persons based on their sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression and sex characteristics, include proportionate and dissuasive sanctions, protect victims’ rights and make provision for them to receive compensation”.

Amendments 12 and 13 ensured that sex would be protected elsewhere in reference to the criminal law.

In a powerful yet conciliatory speech, Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi introduced the 10 amendments. She skewered the most egregious failings of the resolution and the accompanying report that has been forwarded by Fourat Ben Chikha, a Green politician from Belgium. Antoniazzi was clear in her objectives: “We need transparency… I hope to amend the resolution to reflect the reality of the situation.”

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Why indeed had Ben Chikha shackled the UK with Hungary, Poland, the Russian Federation and Turkey when reporting on hate in Europe? Without any context, anyone reading his proposal might reasonably imagine that those five countries were hotbeds of anti-trans hatred. In his report, Ben Chikha cited a 2021 Annual Review by ILGA Europe — an NGO which advocates for the “human rights and equality for LGBTI people at European level”. The ILGA review does contain a raft of tables and charts — but their evidence points to a reality somewhat different from the fantasy Ben Chikha presented to the Assembly.

As Antoniazzi pointed out: “The [ILGA] Review links the data source, Rainbow Europe. In the rank order of 49 European countries, the UK was placed fifth in respect of hate crime and hate speech. I want to underline that, it was fifth.” Not the fifth worst, but the fifth best. The table cited by Antoniazzi andplaced Malta at the top, with the UK only four places behind, ahead of France, Germany and Ben Chikha’s Belgium. Turkey, Poland and Russia languished at the foot of the table.

What these figures actually mean is open to discussion: do they reflect law and policy, or the experience of LGBTI people in society? But either way, there was nothing to suggest that the UK had a particular problem. The UK nation was defamed in this report, and Antoniazzi was correct to point it out.

Lord Blencathra, who spoke after Antoniazzi, was equally forthright:

“In my years serving in this honourable assembly, I can say that the report by Mr Ben Chikha is unique. Unique, because I have never before seen such a biased distorted and utterly wrong work of fiction than his comments about the United Kingdom. If [the resolution] goes unamended then it will bring this assembly into disrepute… What it appears to be suggesting is that UK society suffers from bigotry by allowing an open discussion about introducing new laws about self-identification of gender.”

Even worse, perhaps, is the message it sends to LGBTI people suffering appalling treatment in Eastern Europe. In January 2019, it was revealed that around 40 LGBTI people had been imprisoned in just one month — two of whom reportedly died under torture. How can the situation in the UK possibly be comparable? Women speaking up for their rights in the UK should never be conflated with concentration camps in Chechnya — but that, it seems, was Ben Chikha’s intent.

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Antoniazzi’s proposed remedy was straightforward: “Delete the following words, and the United Kingdom.” What followed next was anything but. It seemed at first that the amendment would be discarded without even being put to the vote. Antoniazzi needed the support of at least 10 colleagues. But under Covid regulations, this was a hybrid session and, in a display of anti-democratic farce, those logging in remotely were unable to register their support.

This led to a dramatic intervention by Lord Foulkes who interrupted the debate to express his frustration: “We raised points of order and we were ignored.” After he was supported by an unlikely alliance of Jeremy Corbyn and Lord Howell, a vote was eventually taken.

Yet it was lost by a margin of 61 to 24 — and the resolution was subsequently carried. Despite all the speeches, and all the facts and evidence presented from the UK, the verdict of the Parliamentary Assembly was blunt: “The Assembly strongly condemned ‘the extensive and often virulent attacks on the rights of LGBTI people for several years’ notably in Hungary, Poland, the Russian Federation, Turkey and the United Kingdom.”

So for now, at least, we can only take solace in the fact that the arguments were made and there was a debate. Perhaps even more significantly, the debate was recorded for posterity, so that it can be rekindled as soon as it reaches Westminster, Holyrood and elsewhere. For make no mistake: this resolution will reach these quarters, where it will be used by those who hope to paint the UK as a country riddled by anti-trans prejudice. But when that happens, there will be one glaring omission in their arsenal: the truth.