Council of Europe (UK Chairmanship)

Bob Stewart Excerpts

Thursday 27th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Walter]

Of course, my hon. Friend is absolutely right. This is the point that we are making. We could have a wider debate about why people commit crimes and why they go to prison, but my specific point is about the denial of liberty and what convention rights that denial of liberty impinges on. It is accepted that some rights in the convention can legitimately be denied. I am interested that Mr Hirst, when he went to Strasbourg, did not say that he was being denied the right to a family life by being in prison and ask why he could not have his wife and children there. He picked on one emotive issue—his voting and democratic rights—but I think that it is absolutely right that this Parliament decide the voting rights of prisoners, and if it decides that prisoners should not have a vote, so be it. That is part of our national sovereignty. It is a matter for national legislatures, not the Court.

My fourth point concerns the backlog. As I mentioned, the figure that I have is 162,000 cases, growing by 2,000 a month. I commend the commission on a Bill of Rights and its advice on this matter: it expressed concern that, whatever reforms we came up with for the Court, they would not deal with the cases currently in the system, and it recommended that we find a way to clear the backlog. One of the commission’s proposals, which is worth taking forward, is that across Europe are retired judges experienced in human rights law who might be brought out of retirement on, say, a one-year contract, subject to their being vetted, interviewed and so on, and that they be given responsibility solely for going through the list of 162,000 cases, deciding which are admissible and, if necessary, immediately sending them to the Court for judgment.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

Did the commission not also recommend that the judges be able to dismiss cases, in order to reduce their number, saying, “We cannot deal with this anymore”? The figure of 162,000 is ginormous. We would never get through them.

[Mr Walter]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Of course, we cannot get through them. We know that about 97% of those cases are inadmissible and could be got rid of straightaway, but we need somebody to sit down, go through the paperwork and say that they are inadmissible. If that were done, we might be able immediately to bring before the Court the few thousand cases that lie in the balance, or use this coterie of retired judges to sit in judgment if there are points of law involved that the Court has already been determined in previous cases and so no new judgments to be made.

It is not all as simple as that, though, because there are other constitutional issues. Many of the cases in Strasbourg get there because, as I understand it, there is no supreme court in the Russian Federation to adjudicate on them. They come straight to Strasbourg from the provincial courts, so we might have to persuade the Russian Federation to have a look at its court procedures—after it has got through its elections, of course.

I welcome the United Kingdom chairmanship. I know from colleagues in the Chamber that we are willing and ready to help the Minister and the Government to take forward our agenda, particularly on reform of the Court. The Interlaken process set in train some years ago was followed by a high-level conference under the Turkish presidency in Izmir, in which my right hon. and learned Friend the Lord Chancellor participated on behalf of this country. I hope that we come up with concrete proposals in our six months to ensure that reform of the Court is not only an agenda item, but a reality.

I wish my right hon. Friend the Minister for Europe well. I commend him and his deputy in Strasbourg, our excellent ambassador, Mrs Eleanor Fuller, who has done tremendous work. Thorbjørn Jagland, the former Norwegian Prime Minister, is an excellent secretary-general—one of the best the Council of Europe has had for a number of years—and is also very much in tune with the United Kingdom agenda.

--- Later in debate ---

[Michael Connarty]

We came in together, and hopefully they will carry us out together. I recall that we also came to the House in the same year.

It is absolutely incredible that a court as important as the Court of Human Rights is clogged up by a type of bureaucracy that could not be imagined in the most disorganised country in the world. The simplest cases that will clearly never be correctly allocated to the Court have to be judged by a full bench of judges before they can say, “No, we can’t deal with this.” There is no sifting process and no filter process. No Committee in this House would run if every Member had to gather every day, look at every paper proposed, and come before the Committee to decide whether it could even discuss it. That is what the Court is about at the moment. Anything we can do under our chairmanship to bring in a filtering system whereby one judge or some other method is used to say, “This is still correct to stay on the list and others must be sent back to the courts of the national jurisdictions or rejected”, is long overdue.

I will talk later about the Human Rights Act 1998 in the context of individual countries. It is a myth that the Court can make a country implement its judgment just by lifting the judgment made in the Court and transposing it into the Acts of Parliament of this country. It is not the European Union, after all. I see that the Minister for Europe is here, and he recognises that that can happen with European Union regulations and all the other things that come in, and we have to just get on with it because we have signed away some of those rights—but not at Council of Europe level. It has to come back and be looked at by this sovereign Parliament, which then makes a judgment on what amendments to make that would implement it. I hope that we never move away from that.

There is lots of talk saying that our Human Rights Act is somehow a transcription of the convention on human rights and the judgments of the courts. I hope that it is, in fact, an attempt by this sovereign Parliament to implement the human rights that we all hold so dear for our country and for every other country. If it is not correct and needs to be amended in some way, that is our right as a sovereign Parliament, but we must not get into the situation where we can overturn the human rights that are available to people in Council of Europe countries just because we believe that it will satisfy the feelings of our constituents.

I held a very excellent debate about human rights and family rights. On family rights, yes, there is no doubt that people are angry because that is used as a plea for someone not to be sent back to some other country. But when we come down to the fundamentals and someone is asked, “Do you think that family rights are due to all of us?”, most people would say yes. We then have to decide why it is not applicable to someone who may come from another country. Sometimes, if we throw out that basic judgment that family rights are available to all of us, and must therefore be available to anyone under our jurisdiction, we destroy something very important in what we have fought for, for political gain and for a feeling of anger rather than for a judgment of what is correct.

[Bob Stewart]

I have a question because I am slightly ignorant on the procedures. If a judgment came back to this House and this House decided that it would not accept it, where do we stand then?

[Michael Connarty]

That is a very important question. If the Government should bring back a proposal on, for example, whether prisoners in custody should have voting rights, and we decided that we did not wish to accept it, we could reject it. They would have to come back again to try to put another proposal, and I presume negotiations would go on between the Committee of Ministers, particularly with our chairmanship in the next six months, to find something that would be suitable, and that would be correct. However, I believe—this is my own judgment—that if we got to the point where we said, “No, we refuse to implement this”, then there must be some question about whether we want to remain in the Council of Europe at all.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Leigh]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman because this addresses precisely the point I want to make. I believe that the convention as we understood and implemented it from the late 1940s to the late 1990s was about the protection of fundamental rights. It was understood to be a matter of last resort. If somebody was really dissatisfied with the way that their human rights had been treated in British courts, for example in the immigration process, they could, if they wanted—frankly, after they had been removed—take a case to Strasbourg. What has happened since then—since we have incorporated it—is that we have had a tidal wave of cases coming to our own judges, and they have interpreted the convention in such a way that makes it very difficult for Ministers to do their job. Members of Parliament might not worry about whether it is bad to make it difficult for Ministers to do their job, but Ministers are responsible to this Parliament. This is the democratic forum of the British people. This Parliament should be supreme—not the courts.

If hon. Members do not believe me, they should listen to what Mr Woolas said. I have already mentioned the case. For years we had been working on both sides of the House against forced marriages and we had been trying to raise the age of women coming here. I mentioned in my intervention on the hon. Member for Wolverhampton North East (Emma Reynolds) how that had been overturned by judges. I ask hon. Members to listen to this quote from Phil Woolas, the former Labour Minister for Immigration, which directly mentions the European Court. He said:

“We have four people wanted for genocide in Rwanda (there are 100 but the four are the test case)”—

so we have here four people who are wanted for quite serious crimes, so not very nice people. The quote continues:

“The magistrates had agreed to extradite them but the High Court had disagreed on the grounds that they would not get a fair trial in Rwanda.

I am advised”

by my civil servants

“that I should grant six months leave to remain in the UK ‘in the hope that the legal system in Rwanda improves’.

I had asked why we couldn’t try them in The Hague and was told as they were not British, I couldn’t send them there!

So a person accused of committing genocide in an ‘unsafe country’ (which country that has genocide is safe!) simply has to get into an ECHR country and they will get away with it. The ECHR is providing cover for people who commit genocide. Madness.”

That is not me speaking—it is a Labour Minister.

I will refer to another case and then I will stop. There were many others, and I recommend that hon. Members read what is going on inside the Department, because it is our only insight into what is actually happening across Ministers’ desks.

“The French Navy detained some drug smugglers in the middle of the Atlantic. It took 14 days to get back to France because the ship was on patrol. But the…gangster took the French government to court for unlawful detention under the ECHR, saying he should have been dealt with sooner!...The smugglers have been released…I have now asked why we can’t change the law to stop this abuse but the MoD don’t want me to as they are using the same defence to protect six British soldiers, now back in the UK, who are being sued from Iraq after being accused of unlawfully detaining suspect insurgents in Basra…So, we cannot detain suspected gangsters at sea and the Human Rights Act applies in Basra. Unbelievable.”

That is not me speaking; it is a Labour Minister.

That is what we have come to, and it is now affecting national policy in a very profound way. The House may not agree with me about immigration, but I think it is a very serious issue for our country. We have to grapple with it if we are going to ensure good race relations in the future. I believe that a population of 70 million is unsustainable. You may not agree with that, Mr Deputy Speaker, but surely you agree that this House, and Ministers responsible to us, should have the right and the power to deal with it; you do not believe that at all times their hands should be shackled behind their back because of a European convention that has been interpreted in such a way that it goes way beyond what anyone envisaged when it was set up.

[Bob Stewart]

The Human Rights Act also has a direct impact on operations for our armed forces, and often constrains the way in which our commanders can operate. They spend a heck of a lot of their time working out how not to offend the Human Rights Act rather than working out how they can carry out their operations. It is a very big difficulty, which we must also overcome.

[Mr Leigh]

I am grateful for that; my hon. Friend speaks with personal knowledge.

I shall end in a minute. I think I have made my point and I hope I have made it in a way that the House understands. Yes, I do believe that the Council of Europe needs some reform; the Court certainly needs some reform. There are obvious things that we could do to fillet the number of cases. A backlog of 160,000 is ridiculous and unsustainable. The Court should deal with fundamental abuses of human rights, which are still going on in some countries; let us be fair about that.

We have had recent debates in the Council of Europe about massacres and persecution of Christians in the middle east. Those are things of the sort that I think the founding fathers were thinking of—the horrible events, the disgusting and vile abuses of human rights that have been taking place in Libya within the past year, or in Syria in the past few weeks, or in Iraq over the past 10 years, and if those countries were part of the convention in the Council, that may be a good thing. That is what we should be focusing on, not these absurd, trivial cases—tens of thousands of them.

I cannot believe that a filleting process cannot be developed. I cannot believe that we cannot have a process similar to that which our own ombudsman uses. We are constantly being approached with requests to go to the Parliamentary Ombudsman, and there is a very quick process which fillets out immediately all cases that are obviously not applicable to the Parliamentary Ombudsman. Then the Court really could be something powerful, noble and great, which would be a beacon to the world. It really would defend human rights, because it would focus its attention on those very real abuses, which, I am afraid, are still taking place in the rest of the world and even, I suspect, in some parts of Europe in limited circumstances.

Having done that, I believe that we should repeal the 1998 Act and replace it with our own Bill of Rights. That Bill of Rights should be based on a fundamentally British understanding of how our common law has developed since the Magna Carta. It should protect people’s individual freedoms, but not take the whole process to a ridiculous conclusion, the sort that states that I cannot say what I believe or speak my truth if it might somehow insult the sensibilities of, for example, an hon. Friend. For instance, there was an absurd case concerning an argument about Islam that took place over the breakfast table in a bed and breakfast. The owner made a disparaging comment about Islam, suggesting that it was a violent religion—not a comment I would have made—but it was said in the course of a normal conversation. He was promptly taken to court for somehow infringing the human rights of the person with whom he was arguing. We all know that this is profoundly un-British and that it is not working. It is preventing British Ministers carrying out what a British Parliament wants. I believe that we should replace the 1998 Act with a British Bill of Rights.