Victims and Prisoners Bill

Debate between Lord Pannick and Lord Carter of Haslemere

Report stage
Tuesday 21st May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carter of Haslemere (CB)]

My Lords, it is a real privilege to support my noble friend Lord Pannick in this debate on whether these clauses should stand part of the Bill. As he has said, back in the 1990s, in another life, he and I used to travel to Strasbourg together to fight prisoners’ cases on prisons law. It is no exaggeration at all to say that I acquired most of my public law knowledge from working with and learning from my noble friend on these and other issues.

Prisons issues back in the 1990s were at the very cutting edge of the development of human rights law. Here we are again, about 30 years later, discussing basic human rights for prisoners such as the right to marry and to form a civil partnership. But it is about much more than that. It is about how as a society we treat those we lock up. Someone said, it may have been Gandhi, that the way we treat those we imprison is a measure of how civilised we are—

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

It was Winston Churchill.

[Lord Carter of Haslemere (CB)]

It was Winston Churchill; I am corrected—both great names.

If we have progressed at all from the way prisoners were treated in the past, we should be enabling whole-life prisoners to find some meaning and purpose in a life that is certain to end in prison. This includes providing opportunities for them to have some social interaction and build relationships, even though they can never expect to be released—in fact, especially because they can never expect to be released. This reflects the long-standing legal position. It is trite law now that prisoners enjoy basic human rights, such as respect for their private and family life, their religion, freedom of expression and access to a lawyer etc. Under Article 12, prisoners have the right to marry and form a civil partnership.

My noble friend Lord Pannick has already referred to the case of Frasik. I will quote again that passage from the court’s judgement, because it is so powerful. Imprisonment, the court said, does not mean that those detained

“cannot, or can only very exceptionally, exercise their right to marry”.

Yet is that not exactly what Clauses 55 and 56 say? The ECHR memorandum conveniently sidesteps that by saying that marriage by whole-lifers

“undermines public confidence in the Criminal Justice System”.

We have just heard from my noble friend Lord Pannick on that one; it is, in effect, code for “offends public opinion”. But the Frasik judgment, as my noble friend said, says that the Bill cannot do that—it cannot automatically prevent prisoners forming marital relationships.

It is not all about the law either. Compelling legal points, such as those we have mentioned, often arise from a rotten policy, which is what we have here. The Government’s justification seems to be the case of Levi Bellfield. Awful as that is as an example of the right to marry being abused, it is one case of about 70 whole-lifers in the system. They have all committed terrible crimes, but their whole-life tariffs are the punishment for that. Even Ministers have recognised that we send people to prison as punishment, not for punishment. Automatically denying prisoners, even whole-life prisoners, the right to marry or enter a civil partnership amounts to nothing more than the state imposing additional, entirely gratuitous punishment on this cohort of prisoners for no reason other than to show the public that it is tough on crime.

The noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, expressing his personal views at Second Reading, put it well when he described it as a “petty measure”. The noble Lord, Lord German, who unfortunately cannot be with us tonight, rightly called it cruel. It also punishes prisoners’ partners, who are entirely innocent in all this. It punishes them emotionally, of course, but it may also affect their entitlement to, for example, a widow’s pension on the death of a whole-life prisoner or a spouse’s exemption from inheritance tax. Has any consideration been given to the effects of this policy on partners? I would be most grateful to know the answer to that.

There is a simple solution to the Government’s wholly justified concern about the Levi Bellfield case, which would deal with all the legal and policy objections that have been mentioned. The existing law entitles a prison governor to refuse an application to marry or form a civil partnership only if it would create a security risk to the prison. Why not ditch Clauses 55 and 56 and legislate to widen the basis for refusing such applications to include cases where there are reasonable grounds for believing that the application is not made in good faith but from some improper motive? This could easily be made legally watertight to minimise the possibility of unfounded legal challenges.

In conclusion, and at this late hour, in the dying breaths of the Bill, I urge the Minister to ignore the word “reject”, which is in his briefing notes in capital letters, underlined, in bold type. Why not surprise everybody, not least his officials, by agreeing now to remove Clauses 55 and 56 and adopt the more proportionate, but no less effective, solution that I have just proposed?