Legal Aid

Lord Tomlinson Excerpts

Tuesday 24th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Faulks]

Of course we listen to what the Law Society says: the Law Society represents solicitors and I am sure that a number of them are disappointed at the outcome, although they will still have an opportunity for own-client contracts and as delivery agents for those solicitors who have a duty provider contract. I should perhaps reassure the House that the Legal Aid Agency has monitored and will continue to monitor the quality of the delivery of services through its well-established audit and peer-review programmes.

[Lord Tomlinson (Lab)]

Will the Minister answer my noble friend Lord Bach’s first question about the role of coalition members of the Government? Did the Liberal Democrats support the policy when they were in government?

[Lord Faulks]

I am not sure whether the Liberal Democrats supported it. The fact is that it is government policy and we are pursuing it. Whether they supported it tacitly or had reservations seems beside the point if the process is fair, as we say that it was.

European Union Referendum Bill

Lord Tomlinson Excerpts

Wednesday 28th October 2015 Lords Chamber

The Prime Minister has clearly said that we will only come to the House to set a referendum date which the House then decides. It is a date proposed by the Prime Minister but decided by the House—because it will be in an affirmative statutory instrument. We would only do that after there had been a renegotiation and after the Prime Minister had been able to put that to the country for resolution. I can see that one or two noble Lords would like to intervene, so I will hesitate at the moment.

[Lord Tomlinson (Lab)]

Does the Minister agree that the discussion we are having at this stage of the Bill would be vastly improved if we had the letter that the Prime Minister has committed to send to the President of the Council and make available to parliamentarians? At the moment, we have all sorts of hypotheses coming into the discussion about what might be there. Would it not be better if we knew the agenda for the discussions?

[Baroness Anelay of St Johns]

My Lords, it is right for this House to be apprised of the agenda for discussions further than it has already been—the agenda has, after all, been set out in several speeches by the Prime Minister—but that is separate from the process of having referendum legislation. As I said at Second Reading, this is merely the legislative vehicle for the referendum itself. The noble Lord is right that Parliament should have the opportunity properly to examine the proposals put forward by the Prime Minister and what has happened at the end of that. I am sure that we will discuss that further next week.

At this stage, I would like merely to give the straightforward answer to the noble Lord, Lord Liddle. The Bill currently provides for the referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership of the EU to take place no later than 31 December 2017. His amendment would move that deadline later, to 31 December 2019. As other noble Lords, including the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Newnham, pointed out, holding this referendum by the end of 2017 was a clear manifesto commitment. It has been repeated by the Government since the election, and as drafted, this Bill will fulfil that commitment and allow the British people to give their view by the end of 2017. That is why I can confidently say that we would not accept the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Liddle.

However, I was asked one or two questions and perhaps I might try to address those. The noble Lord, Lord Stoddart of Swindon, made the point that there will be other events around the rest of the European Union over the forthcoming couple of years. I would say that when we are holding the presidency of the Council, we will be perfectly competent to carry forward a referendum at that time, given the experience elsewhere in Europe. There are so many examples, but I will try to pick out one or two—I have gone on long enough already so I will not test the House’s patience too much. In 1993, the Danish Government held the presidency for the first six months. On 18 May during that period, they held a referendum on the Edinburgh agreement, setting out arrangements for Denmark. During the Polish presidency of July to December 2011, Poland held a parliamentary election. All seats in both Houses were up for re-election and that brought in Tusk for a second term.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Tomlinson Excerpts

Monday 1st June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tomlinson (Lab)]

My Lords, for some years now I have felt a sense of pride in being able to represent this House as a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. However, in recent years that pride has given way to a combination of sorrow and anger at the increasingly strident way in which the British Government have sought to criticise both the European Convention on Human Rights and the Human Rights Act 1998.

Let us be absolutely clear from the outset: the European Court of Human Rights is not a European construct. It comes as a logical progression from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the determination at the end of the Second World War that the horrors that man had inflicted on his fellow man should never happen again. From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights came the European convention.

We now call for a Bill of Rights, but in fact we have one: it is the Human Rights Act, which was legislated for by the last Labour Government. What irony there is in the fact that at a time when we are celebrating 800 years of the signing of Magna Carta we are almost simultaneously seeking to strike down the Human Rights Act.

I think we should remind ourselves of what the 2015 Conservative Party manifesto said. It stated quite clearly:

“The next Conservative Government will scrap the Human Rights Act, and introduce a British Bill of Rights. This will break the formal link between British courts and the European Court of Human Rights, and make our own Supreme Court the ultimate arbiter of human rights matters in the UK”.

The party has also said that it would:

“Limit the use of human rights to the most serious cases”.

However, by the time we came to the Queen’s Speech, that clear manifesto promise had been reduced, and the pledge boiled down, to 12 words:

“My Government will bring forward proposals for a British Bill of Rights”.

I did not agree with one part of the speech made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf. The rest of it was admirable, but I do not think that this is a time just to reflect. There has been plenty of time for reflection. It is nine years since David Cameron, although he was not Prime Minister at the time, established a panel of legal experts. Despite the passage of those nine years, the manifesto pledge that we were given proposed a law of constitutional standing with no knowledge of the content and no clarity as to its compatibility with our international and treaty obligations, especially to the devolved parts of the United Kingdom. The jingoistic claims about the Human Rights Act undermining British sovereignty do not stand up to examination. In fact, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, showed us, the reverse is the case. Before there was a remedy under British law in British courts, there was only one course of redress: to take your case to Strasbourg. It was not a case of increasing the powers of British courts.

Government policy is very confused at present, as the house magazine of the Conservative Party this morning shows us very clearly in its graphic headline, “May and Gove split with PM in human rights row”. It is not a question of further consultation or further clarification, it is that despite the last decade of deliberations there is still an overwhelming need to patch up the divisions inside the Conservative Party and the splits that so clearly exist there.

As we appear weak in our defence of human rights, we are doing two things simultaneously. We are, I believe, weakening our moral authority and giving comfort and succour to those who are poor in their application of the convention. That will be a disservice to mankind and a disservice to human rights, and it is a course that we should resist entirely when the legislation comes before us.

Human Rights: Vinter and Others v United Kingdom

Lord Tomlinson Excerpts

Tuesday 29th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tomlinson (Lab)]

Does the noble Lord accept that the longer we vacillate on this, the longer we appear to be in conflict with the European Court of Human Rights and the worse our reputation is becoming among the other member states of the Council of Europe? Justice in this case should not be delayed any longer. We should comply with the 16-to-one decision. Then we will have the moral authority to talk about the importance of other people abiding by the European convention.

[Lord McNally]

The noble Lord knows that I agree with him that it is very important that we co-operate with the court and that we take the commanding heights in terms of defending human rights. We have throughout our history set a good example and I want us to continue to do so.

Whole-life Sentences

Lord Tomlinson Excerpts

Wednesday 17th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Morgan]

My Lords—

[Lord Tomlinson]

My Lords—

[Lord Morgan]

My Lords, does not this judgment raise the very important legal principle of rehabilitation? It does not say that whole-life prisoners should be released or that the British Government should take any action, but it does suggest that they retain what the court called the right to hope, the possibility of atonement and the possibility of a review, as in many other countries. Is this not a very serious issue of penal philosophy that should be considered as such?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord McNally]

There are a number of architects; Sir David Maxwell Fife was a notable originator. However, what the noble Lord said is absolutely right. That is precisely why, given the importance of this judgment, we intend to give it a full analysis and will provide our considered response in due course.

[Lord Tomlinson]

Does the Minister agree that we do incredible damage to our international reputation for upholding the rule of law when, every time we get a judgment from the European Court of Human Rights, there is a knee-jerk reaction from Members in another place, calling for us to abrogate our responsibilities under the European convention?

[Lord McNally]

My Lords, that is why my Answer to this House is that we are making a full analysis of the judgment and will provide our considered response in due course.

European Convention on Human Rights

Lord Tomlinson Excerpts

Thursday 7th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord McNally]

My noble friend asks a helpful question in putting this matter into perspective. My right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary has quite rightly made human rights, and Britain’s championing of human rights, part of his soft diplomacy strategy. It has been greatly to his credit and to the credit of the United Kingdom. It is important that we have a record that we can be proud of when we look at other regimes and criticise them about their human rights record.

[Lord Tomlinson]

The Minister gave an unequivocal Answer to the Question about withdrawal. However, can he be equally unequivocal about any plans to dilute the application of the European Convention on Human Rights to things where there is a conflict between the judgment of the court in Strasbourg and the view of a Government in the House of Commons?

[Lord McNally]

My Lords, I think that “dilute” is the wrong word. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Neuberger, pointed out in his interview the other day, the relationship between our Supreme Court and the Strasbourg court is a healthy one of learning from each other and looking at each other’s jurisprudence as it develops. What we have been doing, and one of the proudest things I have been involved in as a Minister, was the Brighton conference on the workings of the court which looked at how we can build in a subsidiarity to take notice of the importance of national supreme courts while still retaining the strength and the moral authority of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Human Rights Act 1998

Lord Tomlinson Excerpts

Wednesday 12th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Morgan]

My Lords—

[Lord Tomlinson]

My Lords—

[Baroness Greengross]

My Lords, in declaring an interest as the second lead commissioner on human rights in the Equality and Human Rights Commission, I ask the Minister for reassurance that the Government will, in any look at a Bill of Rights, not go back on the basis of the Human Rights Act but build on it—that they will look at some of the controversial workings of the Act, which need looking at, but not take us backwards. It is very important that we are all committed, as I think we all are, to the basic human rights principles.

Prisoners: Voting

Lord Tomlinson Excerpts

Wednesday 6th July 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tomlinson]

The noble Lord speaks very clearly and enthusiastically about our responsibilities of adherence to the European Convention on Human Rights. Instead of concentrating so much on this micro case of prisoner voting, will he concentrate equally on the macro problem of making the court work? The biggest problem at the European Court of Human Rights is the backlog of cases—over 100,000 cases—and the real reason for the backlog is because the court is being starved of money by the members who have to finance it. Will he make sure that that problem is now seriously addressed so that the court can get on with its real work on the big scale?

[Lord McNally]

I am not sure I entirely agree that it is simply a lack of money or budget. I know that the noble Lord has made this point about the financing of the court before, but that is why my right honourable friend the Lord Chancellor has made this such an important part of our presidency of the Council of Europe; as the noble Lord says, any court that has a backlog of over 100,000 cases ain’t working. We are going to do our best, and we are gathering support for the idea of trying, to get some fundamental reform of the court.

European Convention on Human Rights

Lord Tomlinson Excerpts

Thursday 19th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tomlinson]

My Lords, I have the privilege to be one of the representatives of your Lordships’ House in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. I immediately opted to serve on the political committee in that Council but quickly asked if I could additionally serve on the legal affairs committee, which had an agenda that I considered far too important to be left as the exclusive preserve of lawyers, so I serve on both those committees.

There has been an absolutely exponential growth in the workload of the European Court of Human Rights. If we take the years from its formation through to 1998, the total number of applications to the court was 45,000. If we look at last year, the total applications were 61,300—a 50 per cent increase in that single year on the total for the first 41 years of its actions. That is one reason why the court desperately needs reform. Its delays are very long. At the beginning of 2001, there were approximately 139,650 applications pending before a judicial formation, more than half of which were from four individual countries: Russia, Turkey, Romania and Ukraine. Yet by the time those long-delayed cases are heard, 97 per cent of them are judged to be inadmissible. That is causing an astronomical blockage in the court’s work and needs to be addressed.

The noble Lords, Lord Prescott and Lord Pannick, and a number of others referred to the need for reform. Sorting out earlier judgments on admissibility is a priority in that reform. Stopping some practices that have emerged after the prisoner voting case is another problem. As noble Lords will know, applications to the European Court of Human Rights are made individually, but since the view on prisoner voting several firms of solicitors have been touting themselves around prisons, signing up prisoners on a no-win no-fee basis and submitting thousands of individual applications. That is also clogging up the system, so that sort of legal abuse needs to be sorted out.

However, the most important reform needed is to the financing of the court. No one so far, I think, has referred to this. The Council of Ministers of the European Union gets all its resources for making decisions from the same treasury that coughs up the money for the contribution to the European Court of Human Rights and the work of giving effect to the European convention. In the last decade those people, who get their money from exactly the same source, found no difficulty when the outcome of the Convention on the Future of Europe was running into difficulty at a European Heads of State Meeting in finding a bribe for the Austrian Government. They could not get unanimity at a European Council meeting and, in order to encourage unanimity, they created the fundamental rights agency in Vienna. That fundamental rights agency was unnecessary. It largely replicated the work that was being done by the European Court of Human Rights, but the same Ministers who pleaded privation when it came to properly funding the European Court of Human Rights threw money at Austria, and we contributed to the European budget as if money was no object. They could in effect get plenty of money for one useless purpose: undermining the useful purpose of the European Court of Human Rights.

I am not asking the Minister to solve the problem. That would be asking too much even of the noble Lord, Lord McNally. However, I ask him to tell us whether it will be a fundamental part of the British presidency of the Committee of Ministers to finance those two organisations relatively sensibly. My view of relative sense is to take it from the fundamental rights agency and give it to the European court. I do not expect him to agree with me, but I give him a possible solution. We have a European Court of Human Rights starved of resources, but the same Ministers of the 27 EU countries have no difficulty finding them for other purposes.

When we come to judgments of the European Court of Human Rights, we have to accept that they cannot be regarded as some kind of à la carte menu from which we pick and choose judgments that we like. We are obligated, particularly if we expect all those newly emerging democracies that are encompassed within the framework of the European Convention on Human Rights to observe the rule of law in the same way as everyone else. We cannot pick and choose the judgements that we observe.

I very strongly subscribe to the view of the European Human Rights Commissioner, Commissioner Thomas Hammarberg. I read one small sentence of his views:

“Prisoners, though deprived of physical liberty, have human rights. Measures should be taken to ensure that imprisonment does not undermine rights which are unconnected to the intention of the punishment”.

He goes on to elaborate on that. That is fundamentally important.

This has been an excellent debate, and I am truly grateful to my noble and learned friend Lord Irvine of Lairg for initiating it. I hope, because of the importance and utility of this debate, that the Minister, when he winds up, will perhaps tell us that, after the six-month presidency of the Committee of Ministers, when we have an agenda for reform, he might well produce a report and score sheet on our activities during that period, and then arrange for a similar debate early in 2011.