"Rights" mean what lawyers want them to mean

Sayonara, James Mitchener's novel set in Japan during the Korean War, tells that, due to pressure from (some) American women, American servicemen were not allowed to live with their Japanese brides in the USA. Nor could they live in Japan. So the novel ends with a couple committing suicide before they hear that the American law has been changed.
I arrived back in the UK from Japan at the end of June 1962, just when the Commonwealth Immigrants Act was coming into force. Almost all those Commonwealth citizens who rushed to beat the Act were young men. It was obvious to me that they would continue to come here as tourists or students and find someone to marry so as to obtain the "right" to permanent residence.
Britain had just stopped conscription. So that was an added reason why young men from other countries would want to come here.
I used to want children, but from that time I haven't....
It was Conservative Party policy in the mid-1970s to end the concession whereby foreign men can live and work in the UK through marriage. I knew this would be challenged at the European Commission of Human Rights, so I complained to it about this issue on 10 June 1977 - in order to pre-empt any future complaint being made.
I was informed the Commission could only investigate complaints by someone who had been the victim of a decision by a Government body. So I complained to the Equal Opportunities Commission, which I knew to be campaigning against Conservative Party policy. The EOC claimed my complaint to be outside its "ambit". So I complained to the ECHR about the EOC's failure to support my complaint. The ECHR said I should challenge the EOC in the UK courts. I applied for Legal Aid, but, though I qualified on financial grounds, this was refused by the Law Society. The House of Lords subsequently determined (7 July 1983) that the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act does not apply to immigration control.
The European Commission of Human Rights considered the issue of three women whose husbands were not allowed to live in the UK on 11 May 1982, and declared them to be admissible (see Council of Europe E 56.486) because of Articles 3 and 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Art. 3 states: " No one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."
Art. 8 states: "Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence."
Those three women were not subjected to inhuman or degrading treatment. On the contrary, wives can live in their husband's country, so enabling them to have the choice of which country to live in gives them a great privilege.
Similarly, they can have respect for their private and family lives in their husband's country.
They also happened to be foreign women. One of them (applicant 9474/81) was Egyptian. They could have gone back to their own countries.
In May 1982 British servicemen were being killed on and around the Falkland Islands. Mrs. Thatcher sent them there, but she didn't keep her 1979 election promise on foreign men being allowed to occupy the UK.
In Japan the decision to change the law enabling foreign men to live and work there through marriage was taken in 1982, and the law came into effect on 1 January 1985.
That was obviously done in co-ordination with the Council of Europe's activities on this issue.
It equally obviously does not help solve the UK's perceived immigration problems. Instead, it gives the same problems to Japan - overcrowding and a (deliberate) imbalance of the sexes of young people (far more young men than young women).