Human Rights Act 1998

Lord Murphy of Torfaen Excerpts

Thursday 14th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Murphy of Torfaen (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans and to take part in a debate so excellently opened by my noble friend Lady Whitaker.

During the pandemic, Sir Robert Buckland asked a very good friend of mine, Sir Peter Gross, to chair a commission looking into the operation of the Human Rights Act. This very distinguished commission included a Member of your Lordships’ House—the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan—and came up with very sensible and useful suggestions. For example, the commission said that greater use should be made of Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights. It concluded that the Human Rights Act was generally working well but that it could be improved. There is nothing wrong with any of that, but a later Lord Chancellor—the current one—decided along with the Government that the commission did not go far enough, and that there should be a Bill of Rights. That there is some scepticism about the European Convention on Human Rights was pretty evident in the reaction to Sir Peter’s commission’s report. I do not need to remind your Lordships that Winston Churchill and Sir David Maxwell Fyfe were behind the European Convention on Human Rights.

My noble friend Lady Donaghy referred quite rightly to Scotland and the Scottish Human Rights Commission, with its opposition to this. She also referred to the fact that there should be legislative consent Motions from the Scottish Parliament, and indeed from the Welsh Senedd. I look forward to the Minister’s reply on whether that will have any bearing at all on the decisions the Government might make. They cannot get one from the Northern Ireland Assembly yet because it is suspended. It is not meeting now, but I hope that it will be by the time that these matters are debated later in the year.

However, the greatest impact of the changes which have been brought about and are predicted to come will indeed be on Northern Ireland and the Good Friday agreement—I have it here—which was signed 24 years ago. In the same year that the Human Rights Act was passed by Parliament, I was taking the Northern Ireland Act 1998 through the House of Commons as a government Minister. That Bill incorporated the Good Friday agreement, both of which had within them huge aspects of human rights and the discussions that we had. I had to deal with those when I was dealing with the talks.

If the Minister eventually looks at the human rights recommendations in the Good Friday agreement, as I am sure he will, he will see, for example, the ECHR, which should be incorporated into Northern Ireland law; direct access to courts; remedies for the breach of the convention; powers for the courts to overrule the Assembly on the grounds of inconsistency; the establishment of the new Human Rights Commission in Northern Ireland; similar changes in the Republic of Ireland; and, of course—although this has never happened—the establishment of a Northern Ireland Bill of Rights. I imagine that the Government propose that their new Bill of Rights will incorporate a bit on Northern Ireland but that was not the agreement signed in Belfast a quarter of a century ago.

This agreement is an international treaty. It has been the basis of peace and prosperity in Northern Ireland for the past two or three decades. It will be difficult to persuade those in Northern Ireland who deal with human rights issues, on both sides of the community, that the Government’s proposals will not affect the findings of that agreement or the international nature of the agreement itself. The British Government and the Irish Government are joint guarantors of the agreement. It is facing enough trouble as it is. The Government pray in aid the Good Friday agreement to support their views on the Northern Ireland protocol. In so doing, they must also understand the importance of human rights, the European Convention on Human Rights and, indeed, the European Court of Human Rights for the people of Northern Ireland. We have enough trouble in Northern Ireland at the moment; we do not need any more.