Robert Jenrick has said the Conservative Party will “die” unless Britain leaves the European Court of Human Rights.
The leadership favourite issued the grim warning at the Tory conference in Birmingham.
Jenrick is the only one of the four remaining candidates to explicitly pledge to take the UK out of the ECHR if he becomes prime minister, insisting it is the only way to control the country’s borders.
The Strasbourg-based court blocked the previous Tory government’s attempts to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda.
Speaking at a rally at the conference on Monday morning, he said: “This is more than just ‘leave or amend’: frankly, our party doesn’t have a future unless we take a stand and fix this problem.
“It’s leave or die for our party – I’m for leave.”
The former immigration minister added: “Let’s use this opportunity to settle this issue once and for all, and for our party to have the answer to one of the biggest challenges facing our country.
“Let’s leave the ECHR and let’s get this done.”
At another fringe event, Jenrick said ECHR membership had led to “terrorists on the loose in our country” and “foreign national offenders we can’t remove”.
He said: “If a party of the centre right doesn’t [address this issue] I worry for our country.
“It’s on the Conservative Party to fix this problem.”
Two of Jenrick’s rivals, Kemi Badenoch and James Cleverly, have previously criticised his vow to quit the ECHR.
Badenoch accused him of offering “easy answers” to complex problems, while Cleverly said: “The simple fact is, if you’re trying to grab shorthand answers, quick fixes, the British people will look at us and say we’ve heard that before.”