Human Rights and Civil Liberties

Baroness Ludford Excerpts

Thursday 2nd July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow noble and learned colleagues in this debate and I have appreciated all the contributions. I am surprised to realise that I am the only woman contributing to this debate, which seems a bit odd particularly in a debate on human rights and civil liberties.

I have found it disorientating and disconcerting to observe just how un-Conservative is the attitude behind demands to repeal the Human Rights Act, to defy the Strasbourg court or even to pull out of the convention. My noble friend Lord Lester referred to this attitude as one of zealotry; I am coming to regard it as a sort of “Syriza Tory” attitude. It is a revolutionary spirit that one does not associate with the Conservatives—the clue is in the name. We have always thought that we could rely on the Conservatives to be rather resistant to extreme change.

As I travelled in on the Tube today, I saw a poster advertising a book on Churchill by the aspirant Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. It is called The Churchill Factor and is apparently in the top 10 list in the Sunday Times. This is the same Boris Johnson who, like Syriza, wants to have two referenda, with the public being told to vote no in the first one in order, apparently, to get more leverage in negotiations with the EU before a second. Well, it does not work for Syriza and I do not think that it will work for Boris Johnson.

I shall not repeat what the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, said about the Conservative role in the writing of the European Convention, but there is also a strong history of Conservative support for incorporation of the convention into British law. I am reminded that in 1976 the Society of Conservative Lawyers recommended that,

“the ECHR should be given statutory force as overriding domestic law”.

There are other examples; I am sure that my noble friend Lord Lester is very familiar with them. So to call the Human Rights Act “Labour’s Human Rights Act”—I am sure that Labour in some ways wants to take credit for it—is simply not accurate.

The Prime Minister has given laudable support to the UK’s role in upholding human rights internationally. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office is championing effort to combat sexual violence and I warmly welcome the role that the Foreign Secretary William Hague had in that; it has been taken up now by our colleague, the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay. So why do we not want to take a lead in Europe on upholding human rights? In the European Union context, we are not in the euro nor are we part of the Schengen agreement, so it has always seemed to me—I spent 15 years in the European Parliament and was on the justice and civil liberties committee with the noble Lord, Lord Cashman—absolutely appropriate that the UK should play a leading role on justice and rule of law issues. I should perhaps express a note of regret that the UK has so far declined to opt in to the EU directive on access to law, which has nothing to do with legal aid and does no more than express what we already do in the UK. We are missing opportunities to put into practice our strong record.

My noble friend Lord Lester drew attention to the incoherence that we are hearing from Conservative Ministers, from the Prime Minister down, about whether their intention is to leave the convention. I join my noble friend in saying that I would welcome clarification on whether that is the aim. Certainly, the former Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling, has said that,

“it is time to examine how to curtail the involvement of the European Court of Human Rights in UK domestic matters”.

Many have commented that the only effective way to do that is by denouncing or withdrawing from the convention. That would have repercussions for our role in the European Union—maybe that is the intention—because Article 6 of the Treaty on European Union makes the declaratory statement:

“Fundamental rights, as guaranteed by the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and as they result from the constitutional traditions common to the Member States, shall constitute general principles of the Union’s law”.

So it is clear that you cannot be a member of the European Union if you are not a party to the European convention.

We understand the wish in the Conservative manifesto for our Supreme Court to be the ultimate arbiter of what the convention means in this country but, as others have said, it is already. Except for final judgments directly applying to this country which we are bound to implement under international law through Article 46 of the convention, our courts only have to take account of Strasbourg judgments. A fruitful dialogue has developed. There may have been a bumpy period but now there is a creative partnership between our Supreme Court and the Strasbourg court.

It was not Parliament’s intention in the Human Rights Act for domestic courts to be banned by the convention. However, I understand that during the passage of the Bill a Conservative Peer, the late Lord Kingsland, tabled an amendment to make convention case law binding on British courts—another example of a Conservative input which is thoroughly at odds with what we are hearing these days. The court cannot enforce a change in the law in the UK and Parliament remains sovereign. I have heard my noble friend Lord Lester say in the past that the Human Rights Act is a brilliant balancing act of the tension between the different branches of government. It was a wonderful solution to the dilemmas of how to right it.

It seems that the ultimate wish of these revolutionaries, these “Syriza” Tories, is to throw off external supervision of the Executive on how rights are observed in the UK—whether that is external to government, meaning the courts, or external to the UK, meaning Strasbourg—so that the Executive are able to pick and choose which aspects and beneficiaries should count as worthy of protection. That, of course, is completely against the spirit of universal human rights protection.

It would be fatal to our international reputation, to our role in the EU, the wider Europe and the Council of Europe, and to our moral authority to withdraw from the convention. However, that has to be the logic of what is proposed by the Conservatives. Frankly, I do not want to be on the same level as Belarus. It is not worthy of the Conservative Party. I am upset and angry that this short-sighted, cynical and irresponsible party policy could help to see the end of our United Kingdom as well as the end of our centuries of leadership in Europe and internationally. I hope the Minister can assure us that that is not going to happen.