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Sometimes people say that the convention does not allow us to protect our national security and, indeed, that argument was made by the hon. Member for Harwich (Mr. Carswell). How wrong he is. All but a handful of the 15 rights set out in the convention may
be qualified in times of threats to national security. There are very few absolute rights, as nations may derogate at such times. There is an absolute right not to be subjected to torture and thank God for that. But other rights, such as the right to respect for private and family life in article 8, are qualified as follows:
“There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.”
The convention was intelligently drafted to allow us to row back from absolute rights in the interests of national security. I commend the convention to the hon. Gentleman, and if he reads it carefully he will see that I am right. Some of the protections that he seeks are guaranteed in writing already. He is on record as saying that he did not want people to be deported to a country where they would be executed. That is why some rights are absolute and unqualified.
I am proud that we have this strong convention. I hope that the Government are resolute and stand firm on this issue, and do not wobble again. I also hope that the Conservative party, as it works out its thinking on this, will be clear that if we are to have a domestic Bill of Rights, it should start with the European convention and the 15 rights in it. If we build on that and seek a consensus, we could end up with a document that would be as valuable in the 21st century as Magna Carta has been in past centuries.
9.37 pm
Vera Baird: It has been an interesting debate, although some of the contributions have convinced me that we set about our campaign better to inform the public and others about the HRA and what it stands for not a day too soon. It is a matter of common sense, but that point does not seem to have got across to very many hon. Members tonight.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore), the chairman of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, on the breadth of his knowledge and wisdom on this topic. I also congratulate him on his diligence in pursuing the point about a public authority, with which I have much sympathy. When I was a member of the Committee before him, I helped to initiate the first inquiry into that issue. It is a cause of concern that when the Act was passed it was intended that there should be a functional definition of what a public authority was, so that if a public function were delivered by a private body it would be subject to the rights in the HRA. It is interpretation by the court that has moved us away from that position and my hon. Friend is to be complimented on pursuing the issue. The Government are making every effort to help and we have twice intervened in cases to point them in the direction that we think they should go. We await a decision by the House of Lords on one such intervention. It is a poor substitute, but there is little doubt that human rights can be enforced through the third party, which is the public procurer of the services. My hon. Friend made some good points and has been diligent in his pursuit.
The hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) comes on a bit strong in my opinion when he talks about half-witted bureaucrats who are one law book short of a law library. However, I am pleased that he agrees with me that the press reporting has not helped to clarify the human rights situation. Indeed, the press reporting is considerably to blame. The best human rights myth story was picked up by a newspaper in my neck of the woods and it concerned whether the need to drag one’s wheelie bin down to the end of the drive every Friday constituted forced labour. [ Laughter. ] However, the hon. Gentleman is right and I think he supports us in trying to drive home a better understanding than that and, I am sure he would agree, a better understanding than was exhibited by many Conservative Members tonight.
My hon. Friend the Member for Llanelli (Nia Griffith) also raised the public authority issue. She would go further than the Act and trace human rights responsibility all the way to the ultimate recipient of any public money. That seems a strong line to take, but I was extremely captivated by her idea that there should be inspirational teachers of human rights so that we might inspire the next generation of children to understand them more quickly.
I apologise to my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon for not dealing with the question about full publication of the review. I understand that Baroness Scotland wrote to the Committee in November 2006 saying that the conclusions generated by the review were published as part of “Rebalancing the Criminal Justice System” in July 2006 and that that publication, along with the DCA’s review, fully encapsulates the Home Office findings and properly represents the Government’s position.
Mr. Dismore: Will my hon. and learned Friend give way?
Vera Baird: I am happy to give way to my hon. Friend, but I assure him that I can add nothing to what Baroness Scotland said.
Mr. Dismore: Ultimately, the statement to which my hon. and learned Friend refers was self-serving. Only by checking the basis of the review can we establish whether there is a factual basis for the assertion in the subsequent document that there is a risk-averse culture in the Home Office. Simply saying so does not make it so; one needs to be able to test the evidence, and that we have been unable to do.
Vera Baird: I understand my hon. Friend’s logic, but as I said, I cannot take the matter further.
The hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr. Shepherd) has huge respect for our freedoms and I have huge respect for him, not least as a former colleague on the Joint Committee on Human Rights. However, I fear that he is too convinced that because we are democratically voted into Parliament we will decide everything correctly for the public good, and that people can always be confident that because we have been voted in we shall be able to preserve everybody’s individual rights all the way through, so they need no further
empowerment because they have us. I do not agree. People require empowerment and a means—whether international or not—to implement their rights themselves. I am sorry that the hon. Gentleman’s love of democracy does not make him understand that we need to deepen it in exactly that way.
Mr. Shepherd: I am sure that is a genuine misunderstanding of the position I was adopting. In fact, I said that I supported declarations of incompatibility under the existing law because of the inadequacies of this place, which has become Executive-dominated to such an extent that it is no longer the custodian of our traditional liberties.
Vera Baird: I admire the way in which the hon. Gentleman engages so relentlessly and comprehensively with these issues. My view is that human rights legislation deepens democracy and does not diminish it in any way.
The hon. Member for Stone (Mr. Cash) described pre-legislative scrutiny for human rights—that is, the human rights-proofing of legislation—as undemocratic. No, it is not. A Minister introducing a Bill is required to inform Parliament that in his or her opinion a Bill is not incompatible with convention rights and it is then for Parliament to decide whether he or she is right and whether the Bill should be enacted.
The hon. Member for Portsmouth, South (Mr. Hancock) raised the issue of public authority, and I hope that I have already dealt with our position on that. We tried to intervene twice in cases to clarify the point. He, too, seems to suggest that tracing public cash from a public source right through to the ultimate recipient is the way to depict that the recipient must be a public authority. That seems to go a long way. He asked why we did not publish the strategic review commissioned by Sir Hayden Phillips. The reason is that although it gave us a picture of the situation in 2004, things had moved on considerably by 2006, so it is not such a useful depiction as he suggests.
The hon. Gentleman repeated his main question in an intervention on me and in his speech, and it was about how the Department for Constitutional Affairs would drive the agenda through. All central Government Departments have been offered the new guidance, and there is printed guidance and guidance on the website. Most Departments have received many copies of the guidance, and I am reliably informed that 43,000 copies have already been distributed, although I do not know who has counted them. Each local authority across England and Wales has had six handbooks, 12 summaries and lots more have been ordered. Every police constabulary, every probation service and every youth offending team in England and Wales has received all the guidance. As I said in my opening speech, it is the Lord Chancellor’s intention that he should meet representative bodies to push the agenda forward and he intends that all his Ministers will do similarly. I hope therefore that I have satisfied the hon. Gentleman that there is a real intention to promote the issue.
The hon. Gentleman asked why we could not give more funding to the European Court and the Council of Europe, which are strapped for cash. It is correct that the European Court is suffering a huge backlog, but the
problems are systemic. For example, it receives a huge number of inadmissible and repetitive claims and the court’s problems cannot really be addressed by further injections of cash, at least not on their own. That is not the answer. Protocol 14 to the ECHR is designed to address the systemic problems of the court and to try to clear the backlog. The hon. Gentleman questioned why we would not give the court more cash, but it is our intention that it should function fully. We have strongly supported protocol 14 with that intention.
The hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) champions the freedom of conscience for Christians. He is a former Back-Bench colleague on a Committee and I enjoyed his conversation then as I enjoyed his contribution now as, in a sense, he engaged in a different debate. There is nothing inconsistent between the values of the ECHR and Christianity, and there is nothing in the ECHR that reduces the freedom of conscience for Christians or gives them less value than the freedom of conscience for other people. There is nothing that prevents Christian motivation from doing public good and I know that he will agree that the motivation to do good is desirable whether it comes from Christians, humanists or atheists. When he considers, as he did, what values we could collect around to unify people in this country, the values implicit in the Human Rights Act give us a perfect target around which we could marshal ourselves.
The hon. Member for Harwich (Mr. Carswell) would take us back to pre-war days to stop us being influenced by what he called “some charter”. I can agree with only one point that he made: our human rights culture has been a tad vague. We intend, as I have said, to sharpen it up.
That brings me to the contribution of the hon. Member for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis), who spoke of needing a schedule of rights that was, in effect, a short list made up of a few absolute rights and in which all the rest were provisional. That is exactly what we have got. The ECHR is a short list of rights, only a few of which, such as those against torture, slavery and retrospective penalties, are absolute. Most of the rest are limited, such as that on the right to family life, or qualified, such as the fact that the right to freedom of speech must be balanced against other people’s rights. I am very glad to be able to grant the hon. Gentleman’s wish this evening. I must say that I enjoyed his discursion on Popper. I used to have a dog called Poppy, and one or two friends thought I was so pretentious that the dog was actually called Popper.
The hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) is undoubtedly a supporter of human rights. He raised the same point about the Council of Europe, and I hope that I have dealt with it satisfactorily. He suggested that the JCHR should take responsibility for declaring whether a draft Bill was compatible with convention rights. I do not agree. If I am putting forward a Bill as a Minister, it is my responsibility to say whether, in my view, it is compatible. That must be done as early as possible so that the JCHR can, as it regularly does, report, comment and inform debate in the House. It is a good idea for the declaration of compatibility to have reasoning attached to it so as to help the Committee with its task.
Mr. Dismore: I agree that it is important to get involved at a much earlier stage and we are, in fact, trying to provide earlier scrutiny of White and Green Papers, for example. One of the real difficulties that we experience in scrutinising Bills is the lack of information from Ministers. Does my hon. and learned Friend agree that it would be helpful if we had a human rights memorandum, summarising the advice—not necessarily the full argument, but the advice and the reasoning behind it—of the Attorney-General on whether a Bill is compliant? That would narrow the amount of work that we had to do, lessen the work and correspondence that needs to be carried out between my Committee and Ministers and also, of course, rather better inform the House.
Vera Baird: I could not argue against my hon. Friend because I argued with him when I was on the Joint Committee on Human Rights.
Mr. Heath: I am pleased that the Minister has accepted the logic of the suggestion made by the hon. Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore). Having more information about the Government’s thinking on these issues at an earlier stage is enormously helpful. In that context, will the Minister also consider recertification following amendment? As she knows, Bills often have huge swathes of major amendment—often with whole new sections brought in—so certification at the point of that proposition being considered by a Committee would also be helpful.
Vera Baird: The hon. Gentleman makes a very powerful point.
That leads me to the hon. Member for North-West Norfolk (Mr. Bellingham), who speaks for Her Majesty’s Opposition on this issue and who is concerned that the Human Rights Act 1998 has been undermining the criminal law. In particular, he talked about the Assets Recovery Agency and complained that it was challenged in court when it attempted to seize the assets of criminals. I am afraid that when the hon. Gentleman argues in that way, he is really arguing against due process and I have to tell him that it is far better—particularly if these challenges are, as he heavily implied, absolutely without merit—if the challenge is made here, where it can be done relatively quickly and relatively cheaply and there can be an outcome. That is preferable to going to Strasbourg, which is what would have to happen if, as he wishes, we did not have the Human Rights Act.
Indeed, with great respect to the hon. Member for North-West Norfolk, he seemed completely unable to grasp that what will always remain is the European convention on human rights. He, unlike some of his colleagues, has no intention of leaving it behind, but it is impossible to introduce a Bill of Rights that will oust it. The hon. Gentleman talked about the margin of appreciation as if it would somehow emerge if there were a British Bill of Rights. Marginal appreciation, of course, already exists now and it means a tolerance in respect of local circumstances if they are likely to be better known to the national decision maker on the detail of each individual case. It would not permit the European Court to tolerate alternative Bills of Rights, which are bound to be in conflict with or different from the convention. There would no point in having a different Bill of Rights if it were not different from the convention.
The hon. Gentleman’s point, I assume, is for it to be different in some magical way; but despite my direct question, he could not tell me what would be in it. Obviously, it is going to be different from what we have now, so it is obviously going to be different from the convention rights. What would happen, of course, is the opposite of what he said. We would not recover total supremacy for law to the House of Commons; on the contrary, the only point of having a British Bill of Rights would be if it were entrenched here; otherwise, it would have no effect. That means that we would lose parliamentary sovereignty and the supremacy of the elected House of Commons. On questions of rights, the ultimate arbiters would be the judiciary and future Parliaments might be unable to act to protect national security. The present Human Rights Act avoids that. It allows Acts of Parliament to become law even if they are not compatible with the European convention.
The second difficulty is the uncertainty and confusion that would result from having two sets of fundamental rights. On the one hand, the Government would remain obliged to comply with the European convention rights and the citizen would be able to take a case to Strasbourg; on the other hand, Government, citizens and courts would be confronted by a separate, but presumably overlapping, set of rights for the purposes of domestic law. Much criticism of bureaucrats has been made, but I cannot think of a better recipe for confusion than having several layers of different rights. Decision makers would have to bear in mind two sets of rights, so they would inevitably become more risk-averse. Our task is to empower through this legislation; how on earth would the decision makers cope with such a lot of overlapping rights?
To be quite frank, there has been a lot of guff talked tonight from the Opposition Benches. It makes it absolutely critical that our campaign should be a success, that it should start soon and that it should be driven forward. We must disclose to Opposition Members the common sense that is an inherent part of this legislation, which they are clearly totally missing.
I am proud to be a member of the Government, even though only a lance corporal, who brought home these
rights. I am determined, with my fellow Ministers, to encourage these rights into our culture. I look forward very strongly to the advent of the commission on equalities and human rights. It is a rather chancy, patchy way to entrench rights to have a Department pushing them, when they are essentially forwarded through the courts. It will be much better when we have a commission that can drive them forward, so that they become part of our core, mainstream values and part of the way public authorities deal with all our citizens all the time.
The alternative is the Cameron Bill of Rights, which was referred to by a most distinguished journalist, whom I do not always agree with, but I do on this occasion —
Dr. Julian Lewis: The Minister agrees with the media when it suits her to do so.
Vera Baird: The hon. Gentleman should wait for it. The Bill of Rights was referred to as
“so woolly it would make a flock of Merino ewes bleat with envy.”
I agree. I commend the current Human Rights Act and this campaign, which will bring it further home.
Jonathan Shaw (Chatham and Aylesford) (Lab): I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.
COMMITTEES
That Mr Jim Devine be discharged from the Science and Technology Committee and Linda Gilroy be added.— [Rosemary McKenna, on behalf of the Committee of Selection.]
That James Duddridge be discharged from the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee and Mr James Gray be added.— [Rosemary McKenna, on behalf of the Committee of Selection.]
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