Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence (Ratification of Convention) Bill

Greg Knight Excerpts

Report stage: House of Commons
Friday 24th February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

He is not. We are very grateful to him for clarifying that he is not interested in the debate. There is no wonder the SNP is so authoritarian.

The Istanbul convention has a two-pillar monitoring system to ensure that all members live up to their commitments. The aim is

“to assess and improve the implementation of the Convention by Parties.”

We therefore have two groups: GREVIO, which is initially composed of 10 members and which will subsequently be enlarged to 15 members when the 25th country has ratified the convention, and a political body—the Committee of the Parties—which is composed of representatives of the parties to the Istanbul convention.

The last thing we need is another group from a supranational body that is set up to make it look as if that body is doing something on issues but that just becomes a talking shop. It is not the implementation of the Istanbul convention that will make any real difference to levels of violence generally—and certainly not to levels of violence against women—but harsher sentencing of perpetrators. The idea that having a group of experts pontificating about how well or badly something has been implemented will make any material difference to the levels of violence in the UK is for the birds.

GREVIO’s task is to monitor implementation, and it may adopt general recommendations on themes and concepts of the convention. The Committee of the Parties follows up on GREVIO reports and conclusions, and adopts recommendations to the parties concerned.

There are different procedures that these two bodies can use to monitor each country’s implementation, such as a country-by-country evaluation procedure whereby GREVIO considers evidence submitted by the relevant countries. Should it find the evidence insufficient, it has the power to organise country visits and fact-finding missions.

[Sir Greg Knight (East Yorkshire) (Con)]

Is the UK represented on either or both of those bodies, and if so, who is our representative? Did my hon. Friend consult with such person or persons concerning the terms of his new clause before he tabled it?

[Philip Davies]

My right hon. Friend is usually much more up on these matters than I am, so I always bow to his superior knowledge, but my understanding is that we would get members on these bodies only once we had ratified the convention. If he knows differently, I am happy to allow him to correct me because, as I say, he is usually more right than I am on most matters.

Another procedure that GREVIO can adopt is a special inquiry procedure that can be implemented when there is reliable information indicating that action is required to prevent a serious, massive or persistent pattern of any acts of violence covered by the convention. In this instance, GREVIO can request urgent submission of a special report by the concerned country.

Obviously I do not believe that the Government should ratify the convention at all, but should we do so, I do not want these foreign supranational bodies to come over and start lecturing us about things when in fact we are usually doing an awful lot better than any other country in the world on such matters. We often see this with the United Nations. By ratifying the convention on the terms of this Bill, we will open ourselves up to visits, fact-finding missions and interference by a foreign body lecturing us about what we should be doing, and perhaps even instructing us that we should be doing this, that and the other.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is rather sad if the House of Commons, and Parliament generally, thinks it is so poor at holding the Government to account on these things that it cannot do it itself and has to farm out the job to a foreign body. That would be a rather strange approach and from a Parliament that was lacking in self-confidence. The Women and Equalities Committee—I will not go into the issue of its name today—would be more than capable of holding the Government to account on the work they are doing on combating violence against women, and violence against men for that matter. We do not really need foreign politicians and foreign bureaucrats sticking their noses into what we are doing .

[Sir Greg Knight]

Is not my hon. Friend rather contradicting himself, because if we were to adopt the convention, it would not be a foreign body lecturing us, would it? It would be a body on which we had representation and were able to make our views known.

[Philip Davies]

I do not accept that. Having said that my right hon. Friend is virtually always right, I fear that this is one of the rare occasions when he is not. These things all sound wonderful when one signs up to them, but one does not necessarily understand the full implications of doing so. As an illustration of that, we might focus on the European convention on human rights. It would be very difficult for anybody to disagree with anything in that convention, but we did not realise at the time how it would grow and start to get ahead of itself, interpreting things in a way that could never have been envisaged and getting above its station. That creates all sorts of problems further down the line. In this context, my fear is not necessarily all about what is in the Istanbul convention, although I do have concerns about that—I am more concerned about the way in which a foreign body will interpret its role and start growing to a level that was never envisaged either in the convention or in the Bill. The votes for prisoners issue in relation to the European convention on human rights perfectly illustrates how these things can grow in a way that we never envisaged. I therefore do not accept the premise of my right hon. Friend’s intervention.

New clause 6 is absolutely essential to maintaining our sovereignty in the United Kingdom and to making sure that that is set out clearly in the Bill so that there is absolutely no doubt that we retain all sovereignty in these matters and in what we are implementing.

New clause 10 follows on from that. I would have hoped that the SNP and the campaigners for this Bill would very much welcome it, because it says:

“Any recommendations…by GREVIO…or the Committee of the Parties…must be debated in Parliament before any Government response is given.”

My hon. Friend the Member for Bury North argued that Parliament should be in charge of these matters. If we sign up to this Bill as currently drafted, Parliament will be excluded from anything that goes on. Once we have ratified the convention and the Bill is passed, Parliament will suddenly become redundant. If a foreign organisation is producing reports saying that the Government are not meeting what they signed up to—if that is the view of GREVIO and the Committee of the Parties and they produce a report along those lines—then surely it is only right that the matter is debated in Parliament so that Parliament can have its say on whether it agrees before the Government respond to GREVIO and the Committee of the Parties.

I cannot see why anybody who is in favour of this Bill and is campaigning for it could possibly object to giving Parliament more scrutiny over the process and more power to hold the Government to account. If anybody who supports the Bill would like to intervene and tell me what objection they have to new clause 10, I would be very happy to hear it and try to deal with it. If people do not have any objections to it, they will obviously remain quiet and we can proceed on that basis—we can press it to a vote and hopefully get people’s endorsement. I will give people the opportunity again: if anybody has any objection to new clause 10, perhaps they could speak now. If they do not, we will press it to a Division and hopefully get full support for it. It looks as though we have that.