Exclusive: Ministers face pushback over potential changes to asylum seekers’ rights before Council of Europe meeting Human rights groups have warned UK ministers against weakening protections against torture or other mistreatment for asylum seekers before a crucial European summit this week on how to respond to migration. David Lammy, the justice secretary, is expected to help lead arguments at the Council of Europe meeting on Wednesday on how the European convention on human rights (ECHR) could be reinterpreted to limit the scope of rights under article 3, which prohibits torture and “inhuman or degrading treatment”. Continue reading...

Normalisation of far-right stances likely to affect success of such parties at ballot boxes across Europe, say researchers Mainstream parties are increasingly allowing the far right to set the agenda, researchers in Germany have found, describing it as a shortcoming that had unwittingly helped the far right by legitimising their ideas and disseminating them more widely. The findings, published in the European Journal of Political Research, were based on an automated text analysis of 520,408 articles from six German newspapers over the span of more than two decades. Continue reading...