Theresa May will consider axeing the Human Rights Act after Brexit, despite promising she is committed to its protections, a minister has revealed.
The government will decide on the future of the landmark legislation once the process of leaving the EU concludes, a letter to a parliamentary inquiry says.
The wording was described as “troubling” by the Lords EU Justice Sub-Committee, which warned the letter casts doubt on repeated pledges to protect the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
Ms May, then the home secretary, tore into the Human Rights Act in 2013, blaming it for the long delay in extraditing Qatada, a radical Islamist cleric.
He was first jailed under anti-terror laws in 2002, while living in London as an asylum seeker, but was described as a leading extremist and al-Qaeda associate.
Never convicted of a crime in the UK, the future prime minister protested it was unacceptable that Qatada’s removal had taken 12 years and cost over £1.7m in legal fees.
She blamed the European Court of Human Rights, in Strasbourg, for having moved the goalposts by establishing new, unprecedented legal grounds for blocking his deportation
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In a statement released on Friday night a Ministry of Justice spokeswoman did not deny the Human Rights Act could be scrapped.
She said that leaving the EU would not change the UK’s longstanding tradition of ensuring rights and liberties are protected here and abroad.
The country was committed to membership of the ECHR post-Brexit, she added, saying that Equality Act rights for minority groups, including LGBT people, would still be protected.
In her 2016 Conservative leadership campaign she said she believed ECHR membership had made it harder to deport terror suspects and criminals.
On the eve of the Brexit referendum, Ms May said: The ECHR can bind the hands of parliament, adds nothing to our prosperity, makes us less secure by preventing the deportation of dangerous foreign nationals and does nothing to change the attitudes of governments like Russia’s when it comes to human rights.