Human Rights Act 1998

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 14th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Whitaker on introducing the debate and my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti on ending her powerful speech with some extremely pertinent observations.

I want to step back a little and think about the concept of human rights in this country and what we have done with it. For centuries, our legal and political culture was centred on the idea of liberty. After the Second World War, and especially after the formation of the European Union, the culture of liberty was replaced by the culture of rights. The language of rights became more dominant and with that, obviously, the language of human rights. We helped to formulate the European Convention on Human Rights, we signed it in 1958 and we brought it into domestic law in 1998. During that period, the convention has been embedded in various aspects of our public life, various institutions and in organisations such as the NHS, universities and prisons so that one can easily predict how the principle of human rights is instantiated in a particular context. It is easy for an ordinary Briton to predict how human rights are going to be applied in a particular context.

Now there is a proposal to change the situation yet again. One needs to step back and ask what the change is for and what it is likely to achieve. I have no objection to changing anything, including the idea of human rights. Human rights are defined differently in different societies depending on their conception of human well-being. For example, in China human rights include the right to be maintained by your children in your old age and to be able to go to live with them, and in Germany human rights include the right to dignity so that no defamatory remarks will be made about you. So human rights can be defined differently and the question is: when we look back at our record on human rights, what are the acknowledged deficiencies? What are the improvements that the new Bill will make? I do not see many.

We are told, for example, that Parliament should be sovereign and far more important than the courts of law, and that the Human Rights Act gives far more importance to the courts than to Parliament. I do not see that this is particularly significant because I do not think that a culture of human rights is incompatible with the idea of parliamentary sovereignty. Or we are told that, in particular human rights cases, our courts are superseded by the European courts. Again, this is an idea of nationalism—of national sovereignty—and I do not see that it is particularly significant.

My simple concern is that when we look at the proposals, they seem to remove all constraints, moral and political, on the power of the Government to do what they want to do. The new proposals are intended to be a template for permitting the Government to do what they wish to do, as is obvious, for example, in the case of our refugees and asylum seekers being sent to Rwanda. What is objectionable about the proposal to reform the Human Rights Act is that, rather than strengthening or reinforcing constraints on government power, it releases those constraints and allows the Government to get away with anything they wish to do.