What the evidence shows
The ECHR genuinely does matter in immigration cases. Refugee status itself comes from the Refugee Convention rather than the ECHR, but ECHR rights can be used to challenge removal, including where someone argues that return would expose them to prohibited treatment or interfere unlawfully with protected rights. The Commons Library notes that more than 60,000 ECHR appeals against removal were allowed by immigration judges between 2015 and 2024, although those cases covered a range of circumstances and were not all asylum cases.
So it would be misleading for Anti-Reform to pretend that the ECHR has no effect on deportations. It plainly can.
But Reform's broader implication --- that leaving it would effectively solve the problem --- does not follow.
The UK currently gives effect to Convention rights domestically through the Human Rights Act 1998. Leaving the ECHR would therefore raise separate questions about what Parliament did with the Human Rights Act and the wider domestic rights framework. The Convention is also embedded in other constitutional and international arrangements, including Northern Ireland and aspects of UK-EU cooperation.
Even if those legal changes were made, many other obstacles would remain.
Returns depend on establishing that a person has no lawful basis to remain, completing whatever legal process applies, confirming identity and nationality, obtaining travel documentation and arranging admission by the receiving country. Home Office guidance is sufficiently country-specific that it maintains a detailed returns guide covering the documents and procedures needed for different states. That guide was updated again on 19 August 2026, which itself illustrates that returns are an ongoing administrative and diplomatic process, not merely a question of one treaty.
There is also a wider practical record to consider. Migration Observatory analysis found that around 38,000 people were returned from the UK in 2025, but only around half of refused asylum seekers who applied between 2010 and 2022 had been removed by the end of 2025. The reasons include legal challenges, resources, costs, documentation and cooperation with countries of origin.
The government's own procedures recognise these complexities. Current Home Office guidance includes notice periods, judicial review, injunctions, fresh claims and applications to the European Court of Human Rights as part of the removal process.
The important distinction
True: The ECHR is a real legal constraint and can prevent or delay some removals.
Misleading: Therefore leaving the ECHR would solve Britain's deportation problem.
It could make some cases easier, depending on what domestic law replaced the existing framework. But it would not abolish refugee law, UK legal procedures, documentation problems, diplomatic cooperation or the practical difficulty of returning someone to a country willing to receive them.
Why the claim is politically attractive
This is exactly the kind of claim Reform benefits from because it turns a complicated administrative, legal and diplomatic problem into a single apparent obstacle:
Remove the ECHR → remove the problem.
The evidence shows a much less convenient reality. The ECHR is one part of the system, but not the system itself.
That does not mean the present returns system is working well. The gap between people found to have no right to remain and those actually returned is a legitimate policy problem.
But blaming that gap principally on the ECHR risks obscuring the other things governments would still have to fix even after withdrawal.