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25 Jun 2009 : Column 343WH—continued
Then there is the question of whether it is the constitution or the Bill of Rights and whether it is the same document or a different document. Again, they are different issues, but there is a degree of overlapping. For example, one of the key themes of the Human Rights Act 1998 is the way in which it operates within the constitutional settlement through, for example, the declarations of incompatibility. That is a very neat squaring of the circle, which we build on in our report in relation to the Bill of Rights. We cannot have one without the other, and we have to show how it fits into the overall jigsaw. That is where that melds together.
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend’s constructive response to the debate. I do not think that I need to comment particularly on anything that he has said other than what I have said already. However, I would say that the EHRC was a very welcome development, and that if had been in place at the time of the Human Rights Act, we would not be in the mess that we are in in relation to selling it to the public.
Mr. Wills: I sense that my hon. Friend is about to sit down and I just wanted to make an apology. He raised a couple of questions in his debate, which, because of the long delay, I did not answer. I felt that I should just put on the record two things on the record. First, he asked when our consultation paper on the scope of the Human Rights Act 1998 will be published. The answer to that is “soon”. Secondly, I should put on the record, which I omitted to do earlier—I offer my apologies for that—the degree of engagement with the devolved Administrations. My hon. Friend has many, many qualities, so I was surprised that he took at face value a representation made to him by a Minister from the SNP that there had not been proper engagement between the UK Government and the Scottish Executive on the issue.
May I give him the facts? Officials visited Cardiff, Belfast and Edinburgh in September and October 2008—well before the Green Paper was published—to talk to their counterparts in the devolved Administrations. There are still regular contacts to update devolved Administration officials on the progress. The Justice Secretary has also spoken and written to the First and Deputy First Ministers in September last year. On Northern Ireland, twice I have met Monica McWilliams, who, as my hon. Friend knows, is the chair of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission. So there have been extensive contacts from the moment we were in a position to have a substantive dialogue with the devolved Administrations, and we will carry on.
Miss Anne Begg (in the Chair): Order. As it was an intervention, I think the hon. Member for Hendon has the right to continue.
Mr. Dismore: I have two responses to the Minister’s comments. First, he could be a little clearer on what “soon” means—in particular, hopefully before the summer recess. As far as the autumn of 2008 is concerned, that was after we published our report, drawing attention to the fact that there had been no engagement with the Scottish Executive. That was what they told us when we saw them in preparation of our report earlier in 2008. I am pleased that my right hon. Friend has taken on our recommendations from the report, which was published in the summer of 2008, through to what he has done that autumn.
Mr. Wills: Just to repeat the point that I made earlier, we consulted as soon as there was something to consult about. Until there was something to consult about, even my hon. Friend would not expect us to be consulting.
Mr. Dismore: There was a previous constitutional paper published the year before, which sparked off our debate. I think we have made our points about that.
The last thing I would like to say before I sit down is in response to the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr. Burrowes). He is a nice chap, very intelligent, and I get on very well with him, but he must have been embarrassed by the intellectually incoherent position that he has had to advance on behalf of his party.
I still find it difficult to understand what the Conservatives are saying about the Strasbourg Court. Are they saying, for example, that they do not want to be bound by the decisions that directly affect the UK, in which case we would have to withdraw from the convention? Are they saying that we do not want to be bound by decisions against other countries, in which case it would only be a matter a time before we are caught by them anyway, and would have to change our law? The best example of that—it is one of the hard cases—is to do with the removal of undesirable terror suspects, which has been a long-standing issue before the European Court of Human Rights. I think it was a Dutch case where we were interveners. Or are they simply saying, “We do not want anything to do with the Strasbourg Court at all”, in which case, we would be out of the Council of Europe arrangements in relation to that matter?
That is a completely incoherent position. Either we subscribe to the European convention on human rights and its methods of enforcement, which ultimately is the Strasbourg Court, or we do not. We should not think that fiddling around with the Human Rights Act 1998, which he said has exacerbated the problem, is going to help—exactly the opposite. If they fiddle around with substantive parts of the 1998 Act, which is the convention, which in turn is incorporated in the Act through its schedules, effectively, what they are saying is that we are resiling from the terms of the convention itself. If we do that, either we leave the Council of Europe, or we get turned over by the Strasbourg Court anyway, because
the convention would still apply to us, whether or not it is incorporated in the 1998 Act. That position, unfortunately, simply does not stand.
The hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate says that the Conservative Bill of Rights would say how the ECHR applies to UK citizens. Frankly, that would not work unless we leave the convention. They can fiddle around with it as much as they like, but it would not make any difference as a substantive law. All it would mean is that our courts would not be able to interpret the convention. It would not stop Strasbourg interpreting the convention. It may well be that the margin of appreciation that we now have through the UK courts would be lost when the cases end up, inevitably, in Strasbourg. The Conservatives have nothing to say about the detail of what they would put in place of the Human Rights Act, other than a general assertion that they would fiddle with the wording. There is no detail about what wording they would like changed. That point was put by my right hon. Friend the Minister in an intervention to the Conservative Front Bench. He asked what particular wording of the Human Rights Act they would like to change and the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate had no answer. Unless and until the Conservative party has an answer, we cannot make much sense of its incoherent position.
The hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate asked whether we have brought human rights home with the Human Rights Act. Bringing it home is the right way to put it, because it was drafted, in large part, by a British lawyer, David Maxwell Fyfe QC, on the inspiration of Winston Churchill no less, both of whom, I understand, were Conservatives. When we brought those rights home under the Human Rights Act, we enabled our courts to enforce what are effectively British values and traditions, which have been adopted by Europe. We are not taking from Europe a dictatorship of the Council of Europe and certainly not the European Union in that respect. They have taken our ideas. We have simply repatriated those ideas, as they should have been in the first place, for enforcement through our own courts.
6.16 pm
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