Boris Johnson can’t ignore the delicate balance required over Brexit and the Good Friday Agreement

Britain's withdrawal from the EU, the European Convention on Human Rights and the GFA form an unstable triangle, writes Sean O'Grady

There has been plenty of back and forth between the UK and the EU over the Northern Ireland protocol (PA Archive)

These pesky universal human rights get everywhere, don’t they? They are even an integral part of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), and thus one of the foundations of the peace process across both Northern Ireland and the Republic. In the context of the Brexit deal and the Northern Ireland protocol, the government has declared that the GFA has “primordial” significance and ministers have said it is their top priority as they seek to unilaterally rewrite the Brexit treaty.

Plainly, it’s a classic case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. The challenge to the UK legal standing of the European Convention on Human Rights, after the Rwanda plan fiasco, was made before anyone appeared to have told the PM that the Convention underpins the GFA.

The PM proposes to make as-yet-unspecified changes to the law to permit the forcible removal of refugees to Africa. We also know that, in any case, the justice secretary, Dominic Raab, plans to abolish the 1998 Human Rights Act (which formally placed the Convention into UK law) with a so-called Bill of Rights (not to be confused with the 1689 original).