Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick has said he believes the Conservative Party will commit to leaving the European Convention on Human Rights.

Mr Jenrick also said prison governors have to ‘actively assert’ themselves against Muslim gangs in prisons.

Speaking to GB News, Robert Jenrick said:

“My thoughts are with the officers and their families, but we’ve got to learn lessons from this. In fact, this has got to be a turning point.
“And there’s a broader issue here, which is about Islamist extremism within our prisons. There is mounting evidence that Islamic organizations, there’s one called the Brotherhood, which forcibly converts people within our prisons, are ruling the roost in our jails.
“They are dictating to governors to how the jails operate. They’re dictating things such as the diet of prisoners that are operating quasi-Sharia courts within prisons, and they are controlling them with floggings and beatings. This has got to end.
“Governors have got to assert themselves and take back control of these prison wards. They should not be individuals like this, these Islamist gangs taking control of our prisons.
“What we’ve got to see here are prison governors stepping up and actively asserting themselves, not appeasing dangerous people and Islamist groups within our prisons.
“You never put the welfare of criminals above the safety of prison officers and that’s what essentially has been happening. And I think as a result of some rulings that we’ve seen in the court, which have tied the hands of prison governors and a general culture of political correctness, there has not been an effort to take on Islamism within our jails.
“For example, in HMP Whitemoor, where a murder happened, 45% of the prisoners in that prison are now Muslim. Most were not born Muslim. Most are black British men who have converted to Islam whilst they’ve been in jail, many under the guise of this organisation called the Brotherhood.
“Something is going on within these prisons; we’ve got to get a grip of this and ensure that people are not being forcibly converted and you’re not having these practices.
“We obviously should be building more prison places [the Conservative government] did build more prison places than many of its predecessors but we need to build far more. It took too long to build them. The cost per prison cell is ridiculous. It’s something like £700,000 per prison cell.
“But a lot of this is actually common sense. If you look at the terrible incident happened on Saturday, why was somebody who was one of the most dangerous men in Britain given access to a kitchen with all of the facilities that are available to that?
“The incident that’s happened yesterday at HMP Whitemoor, again this was in their version of a separation unit, somewhere the most dangerous individuals are held. How was somebody in that centre able to go on and kill another inmate?
“Something is going badly wrong in our prisons. The governors and the Ministry of Justice have got to get a grip on the situation.
“[The granting of asylum to the Abedi family] is a parable of what’s gone wrong in our asylum system over the last 20 or 30 years that these individuals fled from the Gaddafi regime, were granted asylum here in the United Kingdom.
“But it seems to be gross naivety, because just because they were supposedly enemies of the Gaddafi regime does not mean that they are friends of the United Kingdom or people who are safe and suitable to be living amongst British citizens. Far from it.
“The evidence just they went on to radicalize their children, who went on to commit one of the most heinous terrorist attacks in our country in modern times.
“So of course, there is a role in very limited circumstances for asylum, but we should be exercising that with the greatest degree of care, and at the moment, because the numbers coming into the system are so vast, no doubt decisions are being made which are careless and for which the consequences can be felt for decades.
“We’ve seen it with asylum hotels, where when Home Office officials have gone into audit, who’s there, many of the rooms are empty because the people who are supposedly claiming asylum here in the UK have gone back on holiday to Albania or to wherever they came from originally.
“The whole system is fundamentally broken. You cannot allow these people into the country in the first place. That’s why you’ve got to have a proper deterrent. When you come here, for example, on a small boat, you should be being detained, you should be being removed.
“The only way to do that is to completely change our human rights laws, leave the European Convention on Human Rights and have an altogether different asylum system.
“My view is well known and long standing. Kemi has said that she’s prepared to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, and she’s initiated a policy process now to analyse these issues and to come to a final position, and that will no doubt happen in the course of this year.
“I don’t think our positions are so distinct. I’ve given this a great deal of thought and have come to my own view. She also believes that we should consider leaving – in fact, that she thinks it’s the most likely outcome.
“But she wants to initiate a policy process whereby we field other people’s views, we think through the issues, and then come to a settled view later in the year.
“I hope I can persuade the party that this is the right way and I think the argument is moving in this direction. I think politics is converging on the view that our human rights laws are completely outdated and we need to change the law.”