Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

Monday 11th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, I am so grateful to the powers that be for allowing me the enormous privilege of following the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay of St Johns. I congratulate her on bringing to the House such an important debate on the near anniversary of perhaps the greatest achievement in the history of international statecraft. I also congratulate her on a career rich with similar ambition for the

“inherent dignity and … the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family”

as

“the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.

She continues to do enormous credit to the tradition of Churchill and Maxwell Fyfe, to her party, to her country and to your Lordships’ House.

Sadly, I cannot continue my short remarks in quite such a positive vein while knowing how some of the most senior members of His Majesty’s current Government will have spent the actual 75th anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A frantic phone-around to shore up petty performative political legislation, designed not so much to stop the boats as to undermine the courts in their vital role of safeguarding rights at home and internationally, is hardly the best way to promote the values in the declaration, still less to show the United Kingdom as a continuing force for upholding rights, freedoms and the rule of law in our shrinking, interconnected and troubled world.

The Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill dishonours the great work of the generation that established the declaration and the subsequent treaties, to which the noble Baroness referred, that were always intended to protect its values with binding law. It is not so much the elephant in the room as the woolly mammoth in your Lordships’ Chamber. It is a post-fact instrument of post-truth politics, literally seeking to alter an evidential reality unanimously found by our highest court: that Rwanda is not currently safe for asylum seekers and refugees. It attempts domestically to disapply treaties designed to implement UDHR values to which we are bound internationally, demonstrating bad faith on the world stage. It breaches the European convention that was the legacy of those seeking to rebuild our continent after World War II. Accordingly, it imperils the Good Friday agreement and our new relationship with the European Union, and it abrogates even the rule of law on which human rights depend in seeking to attack judicial scrutiny by putting Ministers above the reach of the courts.

As I speak, Members in the other place will still be hunkered down in tortuous media spinning of a document that would have the principal drafters of the post-war settlement spinning in their graves.