Council of Europe: 75th Anniversary

Lord Purvis of Tweed Excerpts

Tuesday 16th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton (Con)]

I did look at the dissenting judgment, and I thought it was pretty frank and clear. We have made reforms to the European Court of Human Rights. The noble Lord, Lord Clarke, battled very hard in the coalition Government to achieve the Brighton Declaration, which was an improvement, and we have made some changes recently on Article 39, so there are changes you can make. But I think it will depend partly on the court’s attitude to how far it takes its mission beyond the actual convention rights. I am not an expert on the convention, but I do not think that it mentions climate change and, as I said, climate change or the rights that we have in terms of our health service or education are things that we should be legislating for in Parliament, by politicians accountable to their electorates, rather than depending on a court. So reform is necessary and reform is going through, but I think there also needs to be a balance about leaving to nation states those things that they should be deciding themselves.

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

My Lords, one of the significant committees in the Council of Europe is the Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. The Foreign Secretary will be aware that the committee raised concerns last year about UK immigration policy regarding the detention of vulnerable people who are seeking asylum, no matter how they get to the UK. The Foreign Secretary’s signature is on the Rwanda treaty, which, enabled by the Rwanda Bill, will mean that a trafficked woman who ends up in the UK against her knowledge and against her will through an irregular route will now be detained and sent to Rwanda under his policy. As the committee said, that is a reversal of the commitments given by the Prime Minister in 2016

“to introduce a clear presumption against detention of vulnerable people”.

Does the Foreign Secretary agree with me that, on the 75th anniversary of the Council of Europe, we should be strengthening our support for vulnerable trafficked people coming to the UK rather than reneging on the commitments given?

[Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton (Con)]

What we should be doing is dealing with the problem of very visible illegal migration, which is a problem not just in this country but all over the world. To do that, every country has to come up with an answer on what it is going to do. As I have explained at this Dispatch Box before, it is not possible to do immediate returns to France—that is not something that is currently negotiable —and that is why we have the Rwanda judgment. I have been looking at this issue for well over a decade, and I remember the Chahal case back in the 1990s, where the court determined that you could not balance +the risk to Britain of a dangerous terrorist staying and the risk to that dangerous terrorist if they were deported; there was no balance, as the right was absolute. You can argue that that is a good thing or a bad thing, but my argument would be that that is the sort of thing that we need to debate and decide in Parliament rather than simply rely on a court.