Core principle of humanity at risk

Here's a reason - sorry, another reason - not to vote Conservative or in any way that risks letting the Tories back in. Geoffrey Robertson:

There is one breach of international law that really is at stake in this election... It is threatened by the Conservative manifesto promise to withdraw from the 1951 Geneva convention on the status of refugees. No other UN covenant has made so many lives worth living or protected desperate people so effectively against torture and death. Britain was among the first of 145 countries (including the US) to ratify this convention and protocol, which it helped to draft; elect Mr Howard, and Britain will be the first to renounce it - with consequences that his party does not appear to understand.

The convention does no more - but no less - than establish in international law the most basic principle of humanity and of every faith. This principle is, quite simply, that no state can expel from its territory any persons likely to be murdered or maltreated at their destination for reasons of race or religion or politics.

How could any responsible political party denounce that law?
.....
Mr Howard thinks that refugees are acceptable in small and precise numbers and envisages that his government would set an "annual quota"; once it is filled, any genuine refugees who arrive will be summarily extirpated. Men, women and children, gripped by genuine and well-founded terror, will be forcibly taken to planes and trains and ferries and sent back to countries where they will, in many cases, not be heard from again.

... The convention and its protocol have been ratified by so many nations that the rule now qualifies as a "norm" of international law, applicable to every country in the world. It is arguably a crime against humanity, today, for a government minister to order status-confirmed refugees back to a place of persecution.

Please read the rest.