European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Wigley and Baroness Altmann

Committee: 5th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 7th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wigley]

I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, for his helpful intervention. We are all European citizens; it is a European passport that we carry at the moment. Some of our rights are enshrined in the context of Europe, some in the context of the UK and some—in my case, as I mentioned a moment ago—in the context of Wales.

I am not going to speak at length to this amendment because there are several noble Lords who will speak with greater authority on the legal positions involved. However, I want to use the principles underpinning the rights of citizens in the EU to say a brief word about EU citizenship in a broader context: the rights afforded to us at present as citizens of the EU and the status of those rights once we leave. These matters are highly germane to the amendments before us—and they will not go away.

[Baroness Altmann (Con)]

I want to present to the Committee an observation: according to the December agreement reached by the Prime Minister, citizens of Northern Ireland will still be EU citizens after we leave. I am not sure where that leaves the rights of everyone else in the UK.

[Lord Wigley]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness for introducing that point; I was going to move on to it a little later but I shall do so now. Northern Ireland creates a precedent, if the undertakings that have been reported are indeed carried out. It is a part of a union of countries that may be retaining its rights after the other parts of the UK may lose theirs. Of course, there is a precedent in the context of Ireland: people in the Irish Republic maintained many of the rights relating to the UK that they previously enjoyed after the Republic was formed, and for many people those rights continue up to today. As the noble Baroness has said, many of the rights relating to the EU of citizens of Northern Ireland may well continue after Brexit. If it is possible to negotiate such rights for some of the citizens of the UK, why cannot such rights be ongoing for all its citizens?