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.

Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Lord Parekh Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 22nd October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the Bill of the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, and think that it represents a step in the right direction. Like all Bills, it has its limitations, but I am convinced that these can be rectified within the framework of the Bill itself.

We have had many communications in relation to the Bill and many of them have been very critical of it. They indicate or suggest that the Bill would put pressure on people to give up their lives, that it would devalue human life, that it would create an unacceptable culture in which human life may not continue to be prized as highly as it is now, that there are alternative ways of dealing with human suffering than suicide, and so on. I am convinced that these objections can be met. Many of them are highly exaggerated and some of them involve looking at the whole subject through the prism of the Holocaust. I do not think that this Bill contains anything even remotely similar to the Holocaust.

The point I want to make—and in two and a half minutes that is all I can do—is a very simple one. When people talk about assisted dying, what are they talking about? They are not saying simply that dying should be made peaceful and suffering relieved. They are saying that death presents people with terror and a paralysing fear that one is going to disappear without a trace to God knows where. The death of death has been the preoccupation of human beings for a long time. I think in that context the question human beings have been asking is: “Is death the end of life or can death be turned into an event in life such that I can regulate it? If I plan my funeral can I not also plan my life and my death?” That is what it is about. It is not just about relieving pain. It is about asking oneself how one can regulate one’s process of dying and death.

In that kind of context, some of the assumptions the objectors make turn out to be irrelevant. If one looks at many of the letters that we have received, they say, for example, that life should not be ended because it is given by God. Many of us may not share that view. Others say that life is not given by human beings, that it is a natural process and it should be allowed to run its natural course. Why should it run its natural course? What happens to human beings? What about their agency and their freedom? For all those reasons, I think the assumption that life should be allowed to run on is invalid. If that is invalid, then the question arises: does my right to life include the right to be allowed to continue to live until life comes to a natural end? Is no attempt to be made to terminate, for example, the life of an individual who has been in a coma for months or years? I think there is some degree of sentimentalism involved. I suggest that we face this question honestly and objectively.

EU Referendum and EU Reform (EUC Report)

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Wednesday 15th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, I have been in this country for more than 50 years and I cannot recall an equivalent occasion when it was likely to take such a momentous decision as to whether we should remain in or leave the European Union, on the basis of a rather shallow and polarised debate conducted in a mood of panic created or exploited by a motley crowd of politicians who are prepared to change their convictions as often as they change their underwear. I want to argue as forcefully as I can why it would be unwise of us to leave the European Union; or rather, more positively, why it is crucial that we stay.

First, as several speakers have pointed out, there is no clear alternative. There is all this brave talk about our being able to do this, that or the other, negotiating like Canada or Norway, but it is all based on fantasies. The European Union will not view us as kindly, and therefore will be less disposed to accommodate us. Other countries will not be able to deal with us because they have been dealing with us on the basis of our membership of the European Union and, once that is taken away, the assumption based on the fact that they will continue to co-operate with us does not hold. I therefore think that it would be absolutely mad to move in a direction about which we know so little rather than build on what we have achieved so far. The Prime Minister has brought back a settlement. In 2017 we have the unique opportunity to be president. There are all these possibilities whereby we can use our good offices to set our own agenda and take the European Union in the direction we want to take it.

The second reason that we ought to stay in the European Union has to do with the idea of sovereignty. We are constantly told that we should take back control over our affairs. Well, we already have control over our affairs, because our MEPs sit there and our commissioners take decisions. Getting out does not give us any greater control, because the forces we deal with are global and they require a global response. Sovereignty is ultimately about power and power is not gained in isolation, because isolation is impotence. Power is gained when we share with others in jointly collaborating and organising our affairs. The choice is therefore between insisting on being sovereign, going it alone and becoming impotent or being part of a larger unit and working together with it.

The third reason I think membership of the European Union is crucial to us has to do with the fact that Europe has been a constant point of reference and has provided standards of comparison. In all matters having to do with social and other affairs—for example, survival rates for patients after cancer, unmarried mothers, teenage pregnancies—there are comparative figures for other European countries and for our own. These hurt us when they show that we are not doing as well as other countries, because all European countries, more or less, are at the same stage of development. These comparisons inspire us, they shame us, they make us proud when we do better and they lead to important changes.

It is also very striking that membership of the European Union has been a force for great good for us. I can remember those occasions when people had to take matters to the European Court. In matters having to do with human rights, equal pay, paid holidays, maternity and paternity leave and health and safety standards, Europe has been a champion of social democracy and has helped us maintain a certain standard of decency in our country which otherwise might not have obtained.

My fourth reason has to do with the fact that our membership of the European Union has helped us create a stable and peaceful Europe. This is partly because of our great role in the Second World War and the policies we have followed since. If we leave, there are two possibilities. Either other countries may try to emulate us and the European Union may break up into a conglomeration of small nation states, or the process of unification may go further, resulting in a continental state. A powerful continental state can never be in our interest. It is striking that our foreign policy has always been based on a balance of power in Europe.

The other reason this is important has to do with the fact that nation states are becoming ever less important. All countries are forming alliances and it is only those countries that are part of stable alliances which are able to make an impact. The United States matters not just because it is large and independent but because it is able to work through international institutions such as the IMF and World Bank or its control over Latin America. Likewise, China matters because it has all manner of alliances with neighbouring countries. The EU is another example. Through it we are able to shape the global agenda. Outside it, we would not have any of the influence we currently have.

I readily agree that the EU has its economic and political problems, but these can be tackled by remaining within the EU. The Prime Minister’s proposal as to the kinds of changes he has been able to secure tells us how those changes can be brought about, and I therefore suggest that we should not only stay within the EU but show a greater degree of commitment and enthusiasm than we have done so far, rather than appearing to be sulky and constantly threatening to go home with our marbles if we do not get our way. That is not the way a great nation should behave.

Age of Criminal Responsibility Bill [HL]

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Friday 29th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, I express my deepest gratitude to the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, for introducing the Bill, and, more generally, for his persistent advocacy of the cause that informs it. I am also delighted to be following four noble Lords who have done splendid work in this area, and whose contributions I recognise.

Naturally, in a debate that has gone on for some years, many of the arguments made today have been made before. Therefore, it is difficult to find entirely new arguments. Naturally, I will repeat some of the arguments that have already been made, but also perhaps add one or two that I think are new and go to answer the point that the Government have made over the years as to why they will not accept the idea of raising the age of criminal responsibility.

The current age of 10 is unacceptable for at least four important reasons. First, it is far below the international norm. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child recommends the age of 12. If one looks at other countries in a similar position to us, the situation is quite striking. The age of criminal responsibility is 12 in Canada and the Netherlands; 13 in France; 14 in Germany, Austria, Italy and Russia; 15 in Scandinavian countries; and 16 in Belgium, Luxembourg and Portugal. A striking exception, which makes the point, is the United States, where the age of criminal responsibility is six—but then the United States has never been a good model for criminal justice. I do not think that that is the country we would wish to emulate, in this respect at least.

The other important point is that those countries whose cases I have cited have been perfectly happy. Many of them settled on an age of criminal responsibility several years ago and have seen no reason to alter it or to bring it down. If they can live with the age that they have decided, there is no reason why we cannot.

The second reason for increasing the age of criminal responsibility has to do with the larger, cultural question. The age of responsibility reflects society’s attitude to its young people. Those taking a dim view of young people—almost a Calvinist view in which children are supposed to be little devils who must be tamed by force, which dominated the Victorian period—generally tend to go for a younger age of criminal responsibility. Sadly, this is true of our own country. We imprison four times more people than Portugal, 25 times more people than France and 100 times more people than Finland. Raising the age of criminal responsibility raises society’s respect for its young people and is a profoundly significant cultural factor. Rather than rush to lock up a child, society’s gaze is now fixed—should be fixed—on what can be done to prevent a child behaving in this way. That is an important, constructive point to consider rather than simply punishing a child who has behaved in a certain way.

The third reason that I wish strongly to increase the age of criminal responsibility is in response to the Government’s continual argument over the years that children of 10, or even younger, are able to differentiate between bad behaviour and serious wrongdoing, and, therefore, that if they are able to do that, they should be held responsible. I am afraid that I do not see the logic of that argument because responsibility does not have much to do with whether one is able to make a distinction or not; it has to do with a sense of agency and whether one is able to act on that distinction. One may be able to think of a child who is able to make a distinction between bad behaviour and serious wrongdoing. But the question is whether the child has been brought up in a certain way, is able to control his temperament and exercise self-restraint, is able to think through the enormity of what he is about to do and empathise with the person upon whom he is about to inflict punishment. If a child cannot do those things, he will be unable to act on the distinction that we talked about earlier. The child knows what serious wrongdoing is but cannot avoid it for the reasons that I have just mentioned. In that kind of situation, the response should be to intervene with children’s services teams and, where necessary, by family court proceedings. Criminalising such a child would mean a permanent stigma; it would mark him out for ever and offer little hope of reform or reintegration.

My fourth and final argument has to do with the point made by the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, which was repeated by the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, and others: namely, the sheer cost of this. Although the number is small—about 100 10 year-olds and about 400 11 year-olds have been criminalised—the question is: how much does it cost to keep people in prison, especially when one considers the question of reoffending? At that point one needs to ask: how much will this cost and what are the results of doing this? I therefore strongly suggest that common sense and economic cost analysis, as well as basic moral principles—plus, of course, our standing in the community of civilised nations—require that we increase the age of criminal responsibility from 10 to whatever we consider proper, but certainly no less than 12.

Prisons

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Tuesday 13th July 2010 Grand Committee

[Lord Parekh]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, for securing and introducing this debate. Like other noble Lords, I greatly welcomed the Justice Secretary’s initiative on prison reform, particularly his speech on 30 June at the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies. As we all know, and as the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, emphasised, the prison population in England and Wales has reached a record level of 85,000. It has almost doubled during the past two decades, and we must be one of the only countries where this has happened. Our prisons are overcrowded; we have the second-highest incarceration rate in western Europe. If I may draw the Committee’s attention to the ethnic minorities, it is striking that they constitute just over a quarter of the prison population while being no more than 9 per cent of the population at large and that nearly 56 per cent of ethnic minority prisoners are black Britons. In fact, more black Britons are in prisons than in universities.

Prison is obviously not the answer, as all the research that I have consulted, with which noble Lords will be familiar, has shown. We have one of the highest crime rates in western Europe although we lock up so many, so obviously there is no correlation between the two. Public fears about safety have not subsided in spite of our locking people up in those large numbers. As the last election showed, it was the third concern after the economy and immigration. The reoffending rate is as high as 50 per cent; in fact, it goes up to 60 per cent when we look at those given short-term sentences.

Prisons are also extremely costly—something like £39,600 per year. As the Justice Secretary pointed out, it costs more to maintain a prisoner than a boy at Eton. Those who do not reoffend suffer from mental ill-health and remain social misfits who cannot hold a job after they come out. So far as ethnic minority prisoners are concerned, they experience a greater amount of racism and victimisation in prison than outside. They come out very bitter and angry and fuel the ranks of those who wish this society ill.

Basically, the prison system does not work. It crashes and keeps recycling the vulnerable, the mentally ill and the failures of our society. This has to stop. There should be more emphasis on rehabilitation and reintegration into the community than has been the case so far. We should also involve charities and the third sector and fund them from the saving that we would make by making sure that people are not locked up. In fact, as the Justice Secretary said, it might be a good idea to think in terms of paying them by results so that for every prisoner who does not reoffend the third sector receives a certain amount of money.

I have always thought that large prisons are a bad idea because they militate against rehabilitation and integration. Small prisons that are close to the community, like we used to have in older days, make it easier to establish familial contacts and facilitate integration. In this context, it is striking that Canada had a wonderful experiment in the 1990s when it reduced the prison population by 11 per cent. In within seven to eight years, the crime rate fell by 23 per cent in cases of robbery and assault and by 43 per cent in cases of murder.

I shall end by asking the Minister three very simple questions. First, has any analysis been made of how the cuts in public services and welfare provisions are likely to impact on the rate of crime? Secondly, what is being done—indeed, do the Government have any plans at all—to reduce the ethnic minority population in our prisons and to conduct a study of what prison has done to them when they come out? Finally, and this was part of the Lib Dem manifesto and is something which I subscribe to, is it the Government’s policy that there will always be a presumption against short jail sentences?

House of Lords: Working Practices

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Monday 12th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh]

My Lords, I begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, for arranging this debate and introducing it in a most constructive tone. Since he is for change and is welcoming suggestions, I shall add a few more to those that he has already received in this long debate. During the 10 years that I have been in this House, I have often had occasion to wonder whether our practices might not change so that some of us on the Back Benches might be able to participate more effectively than we have so far. If one were to ask how we should judge the practices of this House, I would introduce three criteria. First, do these practices help us to better achieve our objectives? Secondly, do these practices make maximum use of the expertise available in the House and give every Peer, including Back-Benchers, some sort of stake in its goings-on? Thirdly, do they save time, since some practices might achieve what we want them to but at a considerable cost in time?

Judged by these three criteria, I want to look at four important aspects of this House’s practices. I begin with Question Time, because during the 10 long years that I have been here I have found it difficult to stand up and ask supplementary questions. That has been so partly because I am not as quick on my feet as I could be, while sometimes I am not good at outshouting somebody else who might stand up at the same time. It is also sometimes the case that one is not able to stand on one’s feet until the House decides in one’s favour. It is as a result of this sort of experience, which many Peers must have, that about 57 Peers—as the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, said earlier—tend to monopolise between them nearly 1,300 supplementaries or thereabouts.

It is not just a question of the 57 Peers. If you break them down into their backgrounds, I would have thought that nearly 75 to 80 per cent of them would have been either ex-Ministers or ex-MPs. They are used to that kind of practice; some of us who have not been to the other place and are simple-minded university professors are not, and we find it rather difficult to adopt it so there must be some principle that guides us in deciding who follows whom when supplementaries are asked. It is also important that some preference should be given to those who are not normally in the habit of speaking and who might be speaking for the first or second time. That job is best done not by the Leader of the House—however well meaning he might be—but rather by the Lord Speaker, who is able to spot who needs to be invited and whose turn it is. In spite of what the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, said at the beginning about not being in favour of passing on this power to the Lord Speaker, I strongly urge that this change is badly needed.

I turn to another area where I have participated more enthusiastically than in supplementary questions: the debates. I would have thought that nearly a quarter of this House’s time is spent debating big issues and about two-thirds dealing with legislation. If as much as 25 to 27 per cent of our time is devoted to debates, we should be asking ourselves how those debates are organised, what they achieve, who participates and whether they are structured in the right way. I shall make three or four important suggestions for improvement.

First, very often we have subject themes for debates which are too general and therefore inevitably too vague to allow us to decide what the debate is about. If I go into the Whips Office and find a subject, it can be interpreted in 20 different ways; one therefore puts down one’s name and takes a particular line on it. In some other legislatures, it is a common practice when a subject is put down for debate to have a paragraph explaining what the proposer of the debate would like to see debated under that rubric. That would not do us much harm. Otherwise, lots of debates that I have sat through lack coherence because different speakers, interpreting the subject differently, approach it from different angles. At the end of the day, there is no meeting of minds.

It would also be useful to ask ourselves what is happening to some of the ideas that we might be able to articulate in those debates. Some of us sometimes spend hours thinking about a subject and trying to see what new things one can say. Having spent that much time, you ask yourself: what is the destiny of those ideas? What is happening to them? The Minister, inevitably, only has a few minutes at his disposal and some suggestions that we might have made get referred to in a sentence or two. What happens to the rest of the points that many of your Lordships might have made? Sometimes, the Minister will write a reply but that is often not as detailed as it could be. It might therefore be helpful if, at the end of each debate, the Minister or his senior officials could provide a fairly detailed reply to all the points that have been made by the speakers. Should that be difficult, there should at least be a meeting arranged with them so that those points can be discussed and clarified.

I also sometimes wonder why the practice of being here not just at the beginning of the debate but sitting until its very end is mandatory in this House. There are second legislative Chambers in the world where that is not so. You must, obviously, be there at the beginning, because that is where frameworks for the debate are set out, and for a couple of speakers before and after you. After that, if you hang around as 20 other speakers follow you, only in the hope that you might get a mention in the Minister’s speech, you might ask yourself—if you think about it realistically and ruthlessly—exactly what the point is of staying on right until the bitter end. One might say it is advisable that you should be there as a matter of courtesy and etiquette. Fine—but should it be mandatory, as it is? I sometimes wonder whether we might not rethink that practice.

I also sometimes wonder whether the four or five days of debate that we have following the Queen’s speech are absolutely necessary. Four to five days of your Lordships’ time are given over to those debates. The same debate then comes up at the Second Readings of Bills. Is it therefore right to have 50, 70 or 80 of your Lordships speaking on any given day and require them to stay from the early afternoon until almost midnight? What would be the point of that?

Going a step further, this year I was particularly struck by the fact that if you take a subject—the Home Office, let us say—a whole day is set aside. Yet the Home Office covers seven or eight different areas. Some of us might want to speak on race, some on police custody and some on immigration. Because the Home Office subjects are not clustered and thematised such that we could put down our names to speak on this subject rather than that, the result is that one of your Lordships speaks on immigration followed immediately by somebody speaking on another subject and the debate tends to lack dialectical engagement or critical coherence.

The third area which we might want to look at a little more carefully is the Grand Committee. Over the years, as the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, pointed out, Grand Committees have increasingly come to play a tremendously important role in discussing general Bills. The physical layout of the Moses Room for the Grand Committee allows for easier communication and more relaxed scrutiny and give and take; it is also less intimidating. It might therefore be better if most Bills went almost automatically to the Grand Committee, unless the House decides otherwise by voting on an appropriate Motion.

Finally, I turn to the question of post-legislative scrutiny. It is an absolute must for a variety of reasons. It allows us to compare the outcome against the intended objectives of the legislation and to learn lessons that can be fed into the work of the department and improve future legislation. We can also, through such scrutiny, build up common guiding principles on good and bad practices in the drafting of legislation. This is particularly relevant because this Government seem to want, rightly in my view, to make a bonfire of some of the existing laws. However, that bonfire simply cannot be made on the basis of what the general public want; it must be done on the basis of certain guiding principles, and post-legislative scrutiny should allow us to do that. Some kind of Select Committee to deal with that would be important.

Debates in this House, from time to time, have parochial orientations. We do not look at what happens in other European countries—in the United States, Canada, India or other places. I hope that when the Leader’s Group begins to discuss this very important issue, it might also conduct a short survey of what practices obtain in other jurisdictions from which we might learn something.