Baroness Hoey
Main Page: Baroness Hoey (Non-affiliated - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Baroness Hoey's debates with the Attorney General
(13 years, 9 months ago)
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The Attorney-General
There is no doubt that there has been criticism of the Court, just as I have at times heard views expressed in this House applauding judgments made in the European Court of Human Rights—the judgments on stop and search and on DNA databases come to mind. We therefore need to be careful about too much picking and choosing of what we might think is desirable or not. I recognise that there is a fundamental issue in this debate, which the right hon. Member for Blackburn and others touched on, about the extent to which the Court is turning into a micro-manager.
Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab)
If compensation was awarded, would it not be appropriate for the Government to decide to take it from the legal aid budget of the civil lawyers who will have brought most such cases about?
The Attorney-General
That is an interesting proposal from the hon. Lady, but, if I may say so, I would not seek to answer that question at the Dispatch Box today. It raises a number of ethical and practical issues to which, on the whole, I would want to give further consideration.