Kemi Badenoch said she had ‘not come to this decision lightly’. Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA
Leader says move is is necessary ‘to protect our borders, our veterans and our citizens’
Kemi Badenoch has announced that a Conservative government under her leadership would pull the UK out of the European convention on human rights.
The move marks a lurch to the right for the Tories, who are attempting to stem a loss of support to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. Farage has long been a critic of the ECHR and has pledged to leave it if he becomes prime minister.
Badenoch said on Friday night that she had “not come to this decision lightly, but it is clear that it is necessary to protect our borders, our veterans and our citizens”.
Critics of the ECHR claim it frustrates the government’s efforts to deal with illegal migration and deport foreign criminals.
Others argue that pulling out of the treaty would damage the UK’s international reputation and breach the Good Friday agreement, which brought an end to decades of conflict in Northern Ireland. Russia and Belarus are the only two European countries that are not signatories.
Badenoch’s decision follows the conclusion of a months-long review by David Wolfson, the shadow attorney general, which found that the treaty “places significant constraints on the government” across a range of areas, including border control.
UK Conservative Party leader Kemi ‘not a genocide’ Badenoch explains her reality that the Earth is flat, the Moon is made of cheese and that she was born from
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Party leader Nigel Farage (left) and Head of policy Zia Yusuf during a Reform UK press conference at the Royal Horseguards Hotel, London, September 22, 2025
Farage’s proposal to to scrap indefinite leave to remain branded ‘yet more performative politics from a bunch of millionaires who do not live in the real world’
REFORM’S plans to scrap indefinite leave to remain would destroy the NHS and rip families apart, unions and campaigners warned today.
Party leader Nigel Farage insisted the move would save billions despite a think tank that he cited the figures from saying they were inaccurate.
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Unison general secretary Christina McAnea said: “These cruel proposals from Reform UK will cause chaos, leave the economy reeling and tear apart communities.
“The effect on the NHS and social care workforce would be no less than catastrophic, with thousands of essential, dedicated staff being shown the door. It’ll be impossible to maintain vital public services.
“Scapegoating migrants and spreading anxiety won’t solve any of the country’s deep-seated problems. It will simply make them worse.”
GMB national secretary Rachel Harrison said: “Apart from being morally repugnant, this half-baked policy is also completely unworkable.
“Our public services — especially the NHS — and our care sector are utterly reliant on migrant workers.
“Without them our care and health sectors would collapse.
“This is yet more performative politics from a bunch of millionaires and their pals who do not live in the real world.”
Nigel Farage explains the politics of Reform UK: Racism, Fake anti-establishmentism, Deregulation, Corporatism, Climate Change Denial, Mysogyny and Transphobia.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him. He says that Reform UK has received millions and millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
Deputy United States Special Envoy to the Middle East Morgan Ortagus raises her hand to veto a United Nations Security Council veto of a Gaza ceasefire resolution at UN headquarters New York City on September 18, 2025. (Photo by UN News/X)
“Israel kills every day and nothing happens,” said Algeria’s UN ambassador. “Israel starves a people and nothing happens. Israel bombs hospitals, schools, shelters, and nothing happens.”
Against a backdrop of Israel’s genocidal obliteration of Gaza City and a worsening man-made famine throughout the embattled Palestinian exclave, the United States on Thursday cast its sixth United Nations Security Council veto of a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire and the release of all hostages held by Hamas.
At its 10,000th meeting, the UN Security Council voted 14-1 with no abstentions in favor of a resolution proposed by the 10 nonpermanent UNSC members demanding “an immediate, unconditional, and permanent ceasefire” in Gaza, the “release of all hostages” held by Hamas, and for Israel to “immediately and unconditionally lift all restrictions on the entry of humanitarian aid” into the besieged strip.
Morgan Ortagus, President Donald Trump’s deputy special envoy to the Middle East, vetoed the proposal, saying that the move “will come as no surprise,” as the US has killed five previous UNSC Gaza ceasefire resolutions under both the Biden and Trump administrations, most recently in June.
#BREAKING United States VETOES Security Council draft resolution that would have demanded immediate, unconditional & permanent ceasefire in Gaza, and immediate, dignified & unconditional release of all hostages held by Hamas & other groups
Ortagus said the resolution failed to condemn Hamas or affirm Israel’s right to self-defense and “wrongly legitimizes the false narratives benefiting Hamas, which have sadly found currency in this council.”
The US has unconditionally provided Israel with billions of dollars worth of armed aid and diplomatic cover since October 2023 as the key Mideast ally wages a war increasingly viewed as genocidal, including by a commission of independent UN experts this week.
Palestinian Ambassador to the UN Riyad Mansour said the torpedoed resolution represented the “bare minimum” that must be accomplished, adding that “it is deeply regrettable and painful that it has been blocked.”
“Babies dying of starvation, snipers shooting people in the head, civilians killed en masse, families displaced again and again… humanitarians and journalists targeted… while Israeli officials are openly mocking all of this,” Mansour added.
At the Security Council meeting on the famine in Gaza, and after the US veto, Ambassador Mansour said: pic.twitter.com/PCFfbyJNPV
Following the UNSC’s latest failure to pass a ceasefire resolution, Algerian Ambassador to the UN Amar Bendjama asked Gazans to “forgive” the body for not only its inability to approve such measures, but also for failing to stop the Gaza famine, in which at least hundreds of Palestinians have died and hundreds of thousands more are starving. Every UNSC members but the US concurred last month that the Gaza famine is a man-made catastrophe.
“Israel kills every day and nothing happens,” Bendjama said. “Israel starves a people and nothing happens. Israel bombs hospitals, schools, shelters, and nothing happens. Israel attacks a mediator and steps on diplomacy, and nothing happens. And with every act, every act unpunished, humanity itself is diminished.”
Benjama also asked Gazans to “forgive us” for failing to protect children in the strip, more than 20,000 of whom have been killed by Israeli bombs, bullets, and blockade over the past 713 days. He also noted that upward of 12,000 women, 4,000 elderly, 1,400 doctors and nurses, 500 aid workers, and 250 journalists “have been killed by Israel.”
Condemning Thursday’s veto, Hamas accused the US of “blatant complicity in the crime of genocide,” which Israel is accused of committing in an ongoing International Court of Justice (ICJ) case filed in December 2023 by South Africa and backed by around two dozen nations.
Hamas—which led the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel and is believed to be holding 20 hostages left alive out of 251 people kidnapped that day—implored the countries that sponsored the ceasefire resolution to pressure Israeli Prime Minister
who along with former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, to accept an agreement to halt hostilities.
Overall, at least 65,141 Palestinians have been killed and over 165,900 others wounded by Israeli forces since October 2023, according to the Gaza Health Ministry—whose figures have not only been confirmed by former IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi, but deemed a significant undercount by independent researchers. Thousands more Gazans are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath the ruins of the flattened strip.
UK Ambassador to the UN Barbara Woodward stessed after Thursday’s failed UNSC resolution that “we need a ceasefire more than ever.”
“Israel’s reckless expansion of its military operation takes us further away from a deal which could bring the hostages home and end the suffering in Gaza,” Woodward said.
Thursday’s developments came as Israeli forces continued to lay waste to Gaza City as they push deeper into the city as part of Operation Gideon’s Chariots 2, a campaign to conquer, occupy, and ethnically cleanse around 1 million Palestinians from the strip’s capital. Israeli leaders have said they are carrying out the operation in accordance with Trump’s proposal to empty Gaza of Palestinians and transform it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
In what some observers said was a bid to prevent the world from witnessing fresh Israeli war crimes in Gaza City, internet and phone lines were cut off in the strip Thursday, although officials said service has since been mostly restored.
Gaza officials said Thursday that at least 50 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces since dawn, including 40 in Gaza City, which Al Jazeera reporter Tareq Abu Azzoum said is being pummeled into “a lifeless wasteland.”
Azzoum reported that tens of thousands of Palestinians “are moving to the south on foot or in carts, looking for any place that is relatively safe—but with no guarantee of safety—or at least for shelter.”
Israel has repeatedly bombed areas it advised Palestinians were “safe zones,” including a September 2 airstrike that massacred 11 people—nine of them children—queued up to collect water in al-Mawasi.
“Most families who have arrived in the south have not found space,” Azzoum added. “That’s why we’ve seen people setting up makeshift tents close to the water while others are left stranded in the street, living under the open sky.”
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US President Donald Trump speaks to the press in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on August 25, 2025. (Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)
FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez says the commission “doesn’t have the authority, the ability, or the constitutional right to revoke a license because of content.”
President Donald Trump doubled down on his threats to silence his critics Thursday, telling reporters aboard Air Force One that outlets that give him “bad press” may have their broadcast licenses taken away.
The threat came just one day after his Federal Communications Commission (FCC) director, Brendan Carr, successfully pressuredABC into pulling Jimmy Kimmel’s show from the air by threatening the broadcast licenses of its affiliates over a comment the comedian made about the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.
“I read someplace that the networks were 97% against me,” Trump told the press gaggle. “I get 97% negative, and yet I won it easily. I won all seven swing states, popular vote, I won everything. And they’re 97% against, they give me wholly bad publicity… I mean, they’re getting a license, I would think maybe their license should be taken away.”
“When you have a network and you have evening shows and all they do is hit Trump, that’s all they do,” the president continued. “If you go back, I guess they haven’t had a conservative on in years or something, somebody said, but when you go back and take a look, all they do is hit Trump. They’re licensed. They’re not allowed to do that.”
He said that the decision would be left up to Carr, who has threatened to take away licenses from networks that air what he called “distorted” content.
It is unclear where Trump’s statistic that networks have been “97% against” him originates, nor the claim that mainstream news networks “haven’t had a conservative on in years.”
But even if it were true, FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez says “the FCC doesn’t have the authority, the ability, or the constitutional right to revoke a license because of content.”
In comments made to Axios Thursday, Gomez—the lone Democrat on the five-member panel—said that the Trump administration was “weaponizing its licensing authority in order to bring broadcasters to heel,” as part of a “campaign of censorship and control.”
National news networks like ABC, CBS, and NBC do not have broadcasting licenses approved by the FCC, nor do cable networks like CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News. The licenses threatened by Carr are for local affiliates, which—despite having the branding of the big networks—are owned by less well-known companies like Nexstar Media Group and the Sinclair Broadcasting Group, both of which pushed in favor of ABC’s decision to ax Kimmel.
Gomez said that with Trump’s intimidation of broadcasters, the “threat is the point.”
“It is a very hard standard to meet to revoke a license, which is why it’s so rarely done, but broadcast license to the broadcasters are extremely valuable,” she said. “And so they don’t want to be dragged before the FCC either in order to answer to an enforcement complaint of some kind or under the threat of possible revocation.”
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Mahmoud Khalil speaks at Palestine march following release (Photo: Wyatt Souers)
A US immigration judge has ordered the deportation of pro-Palestine activist Mahmoud Khalil to Algeria or Syria. In an order dated September 12, Louisiana Judge Jamee Comans leaned into Trump administration allegations that in his permanent residency application, Khalil failed to disclose his work with UNRWA and the Syria Office at the British Embassy in Beirut, along with his ties to a pro-Palestine student group at Columbia University. Comans thus denied Khalil’s application for a waiver of removability, a legal order that waives a particular ground for deportation, permitting an individual to stay in the United States, and ordered his deportation – in what her ruling states as “the interests of this country.”
“It is no surprise that the Trump administration continues to retaliate against me for my exercise of free speech. Their latest attempt, through a kangaroo immigration court, exposes their true colors once again,” said Mahmoud Khalil in response to the ruling. “When their first effort to deport me was set to fail, they resorted to fabricating baseless and ridiculous allegations in a bid to silence me for speaking out and standing firmly with Palestine, demanding an end to the ongoing genocide. Such fascist tactics will never deter me from continuing to advocate for my people’s liberation.”
Khalil’s team has already moved to challenge Comans’ order. On September 17, Khalil’s lawyers submitted a letter to the federal court in New Jersey which is overseeing Khalil’s civil rights case, explaining that Khalil will challenge Comans’s order.
“When the immigration prosecutor, judge, and jailor all answer to Donald Trump, and that one man is eager to weaponize the system in a desperate bid to silence Mahmoud Khalil, a US permanent resident whose only supposed sin is that he stands against an ongoing genocide in Palestine, this is the result,” said Ramzi Kassem, co-director of CUNY CLEAR (Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility), one of the organizations part of his legal team, which includes the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Dratel & Lewis, Van Der Hout LLP, and Washington Square Legal Services. “A plain-as-day First Amendment violation that also puts on sharp display the rapidly freefalling credibility of the entire US immigration system.”
“We will win”: Khalil continues activism for Palestine
Since his release in June, Khalil has not once shied away from continuing his advocacy for Palestine. Only days after leaving an ICE detention facility in Jena, Louisiana, Khalil appeared on the steps of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Harlem, only blocks away from his alma mater of Columbia University. Khalil answered questions from the press while surrounded by hundreds of his fellow Columbia student activists and supporters from the pro-Palestine movement. When a journalist asked him what his message was to students who might be afraid to speak out based on what happened to him, Khalil firmly said “We will win.”
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Party leader Nigel Farage (left) and Head of policy Zia Yusuf during a Reform UK press conference at the Royal Horseguards Hotel, London, September 22, 2025
