Our inquiry
5. Following the Government's Report, we decided
to conduct a short inquiry into its findings. In October 2004,
we issued a call for evidence on the outcome of the Review. We
received written evidence from a number of organisations including
British/Irish Rights Watch, Redress, the Committee on the Administration
of Justice (CAJ), the Children's Law Centre Northern Ireland,
the Institute of Employment Rights, the European Law Students
Association (ELSA)(Cambridge) and the Children's Rights Alliance
for England. In January 2005, we heard oral evidence from Mr David
Lammy MP, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department
of Constitutional Affairs. We are grateful to those who assisted
us in our inquiry.
6. This Report is intended to enhance Parliament's
involvement in what would otherwise be the exclusively Executive
domain of deciding by which international human rights obligations
the UK should be bound.[2]
The scope of the Government's Review included whether the UK should
continue to be bound by human rights obligations incurred by the
Executive in the past, without any effective parliamentary scrutiny
of those decisions. The consideration of the outcome of that Review
is therefore an opportunity for Parliament to debate, if it wishes,
the Government's decision that the UK should continue to be bound
by all those human rights treaties which it has so far entered
into. We therefore included in our call for evidence an invitation
for submissions as to whether the UK should withdraw from any
of the human rights instruments by which it is currently bound.
We did not receive any submissions to this effect. The lack of
such submissions suggests that, notwithstanding the lack of effective
parliamentary scrutiny in the past when these treaties were entered
into, there is no widespread dissatisfaction with the substance
of those obligations. The concerns expressed to us in the course
of our inquiry all related to the Government's decision not to
be bound by certain human rights treaties, or to maintain reservations
or interpretative declarations qualifying the obligations which
have been assumed, and these therefore provide the focus of our
Report.
7. The outcomes of the Review have been viewed by
many as disappointing, as is clear from the written evidence to
this inquiry. In particular, the decision not to accept a number
of rights of individual petition has been widely criticised. The
form of the Report which concluded the Government's Review was
also subject to criticism in much of the written evidence we received.[3]
We consider it unsatisfactory that, following a lengthy review,
the Report stated its conclusions in brief terms, and supported
those conclusions with only very general reasons. It is a
matter of record that, on key points in the Review, those consulted
were unanimous in recommending changes which the Review ultimately
concluded against:[4] on
these points, and others, the report contains no analysis of the
arguments put by those who were consulted in the course of the
Review.
8. We do not think that the subject matter of this
Review can be dismissed as being of technical or legal significance
only. Many of the reservations and unratified provisions considered
as part of this Review have been raised repeatedly in our inquiries,
as affording human rights protection for vulnerable people. The
availability of complaints mechanisms, such as those considered
in this Review, is likewise a key element in transforming human
rights principles into real protection for individuals. These
matters therefore deserve the serious attention of the Government.
1 
