Yet another immigration and human rights story scandalised the right-leaning press yesterday. Thirty-odd arrivals who came by boat in 2020 have, according to the Home Office, received damages totalling around £200,000. This came after a 2022 decision by the High Court which found their human rights had been infringed when on arrival they had been searched, and their mobile phones forcibly seized and trawled through. Police and immigration officers were looking for leads on the racketeers who had organised migrant journeys and anyone who might have helped them. Over 40 other similar claimants are still negotiating over compensation; the ultimate bill to the taxpayer could easily top half-a-million.

There is a strong case for leaving the ECHR as a necessary first step towards the maintenance of a proper immigration policy. But while necessary, this is not sufficient

Is this yet another case of blatant ECHR overreach? You could be forgiven for thinking so. Yet we have to be fair; and oddly enough, for once this isn’t. True, according to the court the government had technically been in breach of the ECHR. But this was largely because there had been no warrant even in English law for the searches and seizures. Since the ECHR demands that any interference with someone’s rights be prescribed by law, it equally followed that there had been a breach of it too. Had the government given itself the domestic power to act as it did the Convention would not have come into play. (Readers will be relieved that the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025 has since last December provided just such a power; it follows that this debacle at least won’t be repeated.)

Should we take comfort at this? Not necessarily. A glance at the facts, and at the relevant High Court judgment (available here) gives us a window into the chaotic nature of our immigration control. All this happened on the Tories’ watch in 2022: but whether the administration is any better under the present Home Office is, to say the least, an open question.

For one thing, this case shows starkly that no serious effort was made to check the adequacy of immigration legislation once the trickle of individual entrants had become a flood, and an obvious racket under the careful control of organised crime. It should have been obvious then that draconian powers of search for anyone arriving unannounced on these shores were needed. After the 2019 election there was little doubt that if those powers were not there parliament would have nodded them through if the government made time. Nothing was done.

Even when it became patently obvious that some kind of action was necessary, things got no better. Instead of carefully checking what its legal powers were, the Home Office seems to have simply started issuing orders to people on the ground, rather in the manner of an eighteenth-century secretary of state in the Walpole era suppressing subversion. All arrivals were to be searched, all phones seized and sifted, and everyone told to provide necessary pin numbers and threatened with prosecution if they didn’t.

Even these orders were hardly clear-cut. In a damning passage, the High Court pointed out that the then-Home Secretary, Priti Patel, or at least her officials, had to admit that the ‘precise origins’ of the order to seize all phones was unknown.

The attitude seems to have been that it was a matter of winging it, assuming complacently that if push came to shove the necessary legal powers must be there somewhere, if only somebody looked carefully enough for them.

Unfortunately they weren’t. As soon as the matter came to court, the Home Office had to admit that it had no answer to a great deal of the claimants’ case. There was no general power to seize mobile phones outside of carefully-defined circumstances where they were reasonably suspected to contain evidence of crime. Warnings that pin numbers had to be provided on pain of criminal penalties had been a blatant untruth. The Home Office was left flailing around, desperately looking for excuses only to have them rapidly demolished by the court.

There is a strong case for leaving the ECHR as a necessary first step towards the maintenance of a proper immigration policy. But while necessary, this is not sufficient: a competent administrative machinery, able to use the powers that it does have at its disposal, is just as important.

The mobile phone debacle shows this in stark relief. It should be a wake-up call. It is certainly an opportunity for Labour, if it wanted to take it. But don’t hold your breath.