Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Debate between Lord Bishop of Chichester and Baroness Stern

Thursday 9th February 2012 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Chichester]

My Lords, it will not surprise you that I wholeheartedly support the amendment. I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Judd, for warning against sentiment. There is a robustness about offering human beings hope that contributes specifically to the rehabilitation and reconstruction of which he spoke. However, this is about much more than simply giving hope to individuals, because a society that does not give hope to individuals is unlikely to have hope for itself in areas in which it feels as a society hopeless. In terms of a civilised society, this is a very humane amendment which is necessary for our societal good as well as for the individuals for whom it is designed.

[Baroness Stern]

My Lords, I support the amendment and endorse the excellent speeches made by all those who have spoken so far. I stress, as they have, that this is not an amendment about releasing any particular person who has done any particular thing; it is an amendment about what sort of penal system we have and its values.

One of the consequences of the very welcome abolition of the death penalty—I declare an interest as chair of the All-Party Group for the Abolition of the Death Penalty—was a search for another sentence for the most serious and dreadful crimes. A few countries decided to adopt the life-without-parole alternative. In the United States in 2009, there were more than 2,500 juveniles serving a sentence of life without parole, which is probably at the extreme end of the use of the sentence.

I have always been of the view that a non-reviewable life sentence, or what is called by the courts an irreducible life sentence, with no provision for reconsideration by the authorities whatever the circumstances—be it their health condition, their extreme old age or a dramatic change in the way the person sees the world—must surely constitute inhuman and degrading treatment. I was one of those disappointed by the European Court of Human Rights not reaching that view in the case of Vintner and others v United Kingdom. That case was barely reported, probably because the court found in favour of the Government; it seems to be the other cases that are always widely reported and commented upon. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd, said, the court’s judgment was by a slim majority of four against three. I shall quote briefly from the opinion of the three dissenting judges. They said:

“we conclude that there was a procedural infringement by reason of the absence of some mechanism that would remove the hopelessness inherent in a sentence of life imprisonment from which, independently of the circumstances, there is no possibility whatsoever of release while the prisoner is still well enough to have any sort of life outside prison”.

In 2007, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture said of the whole life sentence:

“the CPT has serious reservations about the very concept according to which such prisoners, once they are sentenced, are considered once and for all as a permanent threat to the community and are deprived of any hope to be granted conditional release”.

The German constitutional court found in 2010 that if someone had no practical prospect of release, a life sentence would be cruel and degrading and infringe the requirements of human dignity provided for in Article 1 of the German Basic Law. I also remind the Committee that the statute of the International Criminal Court—which, as noble Lords will know, deals only with the most heinous crimes—expressly provides for a review of detention by the court after 25 years.