Withdrawal Agreement: Legal Opinion

Debate between Geoffrey Cox and Oliver Heald

1st reading: House of Commons
Tuesday 12th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[The Attorney General]

I would need to see the hon. Lady’s quotation in detail. The position is that if you agree and put your name to a joint instrument of this kind, you are bound by it. You are bound by it as to its interpretation and, if it expresses agreement to specific operational commitments, as this one does, you are bound by it on those, because it is an agreement that you will then carry out those specific commitments. It is an agreement, so we should not get hung up on labels. The question is: what is its substance? It is binding.

[Sir Oliver Heald (North East Hertfordshire) (Con)]

Does my right hon. and learned Friend agree that article 31 of the Vienna convention makes it perfectly clear that this protocol does have legal force, is binding and is of equal status to the treaty? Does he also agree that substantial, legally binding changes have been delivered, and that it is wrong to read just one paragraph of his legal advice—one has to read each paragraph of it? When it comes to paragraph 17 of his advice, my right hon. and learned Friend makes it clear that this is a substantial change in the level of risk.

[The Attorney General]

I think I had better just say that I agree with that one.

Withdrawal Agreement: Legal Position

Debate between Geoffrey Cox and Oliver Heald

Monday 3rd December 2018 Commons Chamber

[The Attorney General]

The regulatory regime in Great Britain will be a matter entirely for the Government of the United Kingdom. It is permitted and agreed under the protocol that they can maintain their regulatory regime in the way they choose, in which case they could choose to maintain, as I have no doubt they would wish to do, regulatory parity with the position in Northern Ireland. That is all the Secretary of State is saying, and I see nothing controversial in that.

[Sir Oliver Heald (North East Hertfordshire) (Con)]

I commend my right hon. and learned Friend on the statement he has made. Does he agree that in international law concepts of good faith and of using one’s best endeavours are very important, because right at the heart of international law is the idea of a rules-based system that good countries aspire to? Does he agree that it is therefore important both to the UK and to the EU that they should show good faith and should use their best endeavours? Does he also agree that if they did not do so when it came to the point that has just been raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Sir Michael Fallon) about paragraph 11 in the references to the protocol, it would be an absolute disaster for either the UK or the EU to be found not to be in good faith?

Public Confidence in the Media and Police

Debate between Geoffrey Cox and Oliver Heald

Wednesday 20th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[Keith Vaz]

I will write to the previous Attorney-General today to ask for that information.

[Oliver Heald]

rose—

[Mr Cox]

I will give way to my hon. Friend.

[Oliver Heald]

When the former Home Secretary spoke a moment ago, he used the words, “or informally”. Does my hon. Friend think that one aspect that may need examining is whether the matter was another subject that fell into the “sofa Government” category, and that the Attorney-General may have spoken to the Prime Minister or one or two others, but it was not brought before the full Cabinet?

[Mr Cox]

The matter needs to be closely examined, and the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee has taken it on board. With the greatest respect to the Attorney-General at the time, if he was informed of the matter, he should have interested himself in exactly how the investigation would be conducted. On the face of it, an enormous amount of wrongdoing was simply ignored. The police appear to have proposed a strategy, which would, as the briefing paper put it to the Attorney-General, “ring-fence” Mulcaire and Goodman and exclude a whole raft of serious criminal wrongdoing from investigation. That may well have affected Members.

I do not know to whom the Committee refers when it says that neither Ministers nor the police escalated the matter. As the Committee put it, if Ministers at the time had taken those issues sufficiently seriously, the matter would have been investigated. The truth would have been discovered then and we could have avoided a whole series of events that we now know unfolded.

My second point is about the review suggested by then Deputy Assistant Commissioner Yates. The Home Affairs Committee has rightly judged, in tone and substance, its criticisms of Mr Yates and Mr Hayman. There are serious questions to be asked about why an investigation or a review—I appreciate that it was not a formal review—that was carried out in eight hours apparently failed to read material that, as the former Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions was able to determine in a few minutes, gave rise to the gravest illegalities. On the face of it, that is either wilful blindness or rank incompetence. Whatever the reason, Mr Yates’s resignation was right and done for proper reasons. It is inconceivable that, if the exercise had been carried out properly, the material would not have come to light in 2009. Questions arise about the closeness of officers of the Metropolitan police to News International and whether that deflected and deterred them from a rigorous analysis of the evidence that had been in their possession since 2006. It was not only in their possession, but, as the memorandum of 30 May 2006 to the Attorney-General shows, they had discovered that it included

“a vast array of offending behaviour.”