Queen’s Speech

Lord Pannick Excerpts

Tuesday 24th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

My Lords, the gracious Speech states:

“Proposals will be brought forward for a British Bill of Rights”.

I declare an interest as a practising barrister who sometimes appeared against the Minister in his former life. The Minister said that we would not have to wait much longer to hear the details of the proposals. We certainly did not hear any of the details this afternoon.

We are accustomed in this House to mature reflection before a conclusion is reached on matters of policy. However, the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war and the assessment of the case for another runway at Heathrow Airport are each the impetuous rush to judgment of men and women in an unseemly hurry compared with the protracted and painful saga of the Conservative Party’s deliberations on human rights.

In February 2009, the Guardian newspaper reported that David Cameron, then leader of the Opposition, promised to repeal the Human Rights Act and replace it with a British Bill of Rights. The Guardian report of seven and a quarter years ago concluded:

“The Conservatives have yet to spell out in detail what exactly would be covered by their British bill of rights”.

Nothing has changed. Since 2009, human rights law has survived Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada, and has survived, just about, the Lord Chancellorship of Mr Chris Grayling, the man noble Lords may remember told the Conservative Party conference in September 2014 that he “supports real human rights”, and so opposes,

“the terrible things done in countries like North Korea”.

That sets the bar rather low for most people’s comfort. Human rights law will even survive Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, joining the Labour Party, whose recent record on human rights has been less than glorious.

Conservative Ministers have given innumerable speeches on a British Bill of Rights, but as to substance there has been none. Of course, there was a coalition Government for five years, but if the Conservatives were prevented from implementing a policy, that is no excuse for their inability to articulate a policy.

There is, of course, a very good reason for their repeated failures to come forward with concrete proposals on human rights. It is very easy to express political platitudes on this subject and to pander to popular prejudice. It is much more difficult to come forward with coherent proposals which would improve the current state of the law. What we do know is that the Lord Chancellor, Mr Gove, told the House of Commons last month that the Government’s position is that we should remain within the European Convention on Human Rights. On 26 April, the Attorney-General, Mr Jeremy Wright, told the other place that,

“we have no objections to the text of the convention; it is indeed a fine document”.—[Official Report, Commons, 26/4/16; col. 1289.]

The Minister repeated that today, not in those words but in substance. What the Minister told us—and it is all he told us about the substance of these proposals—is that the concern is not the contents of the convention but the rulings of the European court. But how will a British Bill of Rights assist on that, when being a party to the convention means an obligation to implement its terms, as interpreted in the judgments of the Strasbourg court?

There is a problem with the protection of human rights in this country: it is the willingness of politicians and the press to use human rights as a political football. However, I must say that I find newspaper editors, as clients, as keen as anybody else on the protection offered by human rights in relation to unfair or arbitrary government decisions. I have a proposal: instead of denigrating and undermining human rights law because of objections to a tiny minority of Strasbourg court judgments, this Government should focus on educating children and informing adults of the value of the Human Rights Act in contributing to our civilised society. If and when the Government do bring forward concrete proposals, this House will need to scrutinise them most carefully.