Northern Ireland (Executive Formation) Bill

Debate between Stella Creasy and Fiona Bruce

3rd reading: House of Commons & Committee: 1st sitting: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 9th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Stella Creasy]

Forgive me, but I have given way. I am conscious that other people want to speak in this debate. I understand the concerns of the right hon. Member for Basingstoke, who is no longer here, but I genuinely believe that if we do not address the international obligations that we have—and that this legislation leaves us unable to address at the moment—we will continue to see these cases. We will continue to see the distress of women in Northern Ireland, and that will be a human rights issue.

There is a more fundamental point here, which the right hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs talked about: if we are prepared to jettison some human rights and say that they are not as important as others, that is the thin end of the wedge. Are we going to say that in Northern Ireland people will not have the same rights of freedom of expression, of protection from slavery and of protection from torture, and the same rights to life? Specific human rights, and specific international reports and obligations that we have been part of, are at the heart of this amendment. We will not be able to stand up and champion human rights in other parts of the world, because other countries will rightly turn to us and say, “Hang about, what about your own backyard? What are you doing there?”

I understand that, if it was not for the fact that we do not have an Assembly, this would absolutely not be the right way forward, but we do not have an Assembly and we will not have one any time soon. This is about a power of a statutory instrument; it is not about specifying what should be in that statutory instrument, so there is plenty of scope to address these issues. Medical guidelines have been prepared by campaigners in Northern Ireland, be they Alliance for Choice, the London-Irish Abortion Rights Campaign, Together for Yes or those medical agencies.

There is a simple point here: each of us should want, in the work that we do at a national and international level, the same rights that we want for our own constituents. I would like every woman in Walthamstow to be able to have the choice to have a safe, legal and local abortion if she wants it. We all know that stopping people accessing abortion legally does not stop abortion. The cases where there have been prosecutions, where people have been killed and where we see online the stories of these women tell us that abortion is still happening for Northern Irish women, but right now that issue is being exported, rather than dealt with as an equalities issue. So I ask the Committee: how much longer are the women of Northern Ireland expected to wait? How much more are they expected to suffer before we speak up—the best of what this place does—as human rights defenders, not human rights deniers?

[Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)]

I find myself in agreement with the concerns expressed by the Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee about the far-reaching implications of new clause 10, which relates to abortion law changes in Northern Ireland but has implications for England and Wales, too. So I am against that proposal, and new clauses 11 and 12. This is not the time, nor the place, to be making such changes, which are of course completely unconstitutional, bearing in mind that devolution has ensured that abortion is an issue that Northern Ireland and its own Assembly have had authority to make decisions on for almost 100 years.