Voting Eligibility (Prisoners)

Jack Straw Excerpts

Thursday 22nd November 2012 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

Let me say in answer to the right hon. Gentleman’s question about the different options that it will be for the Committee to decide whether there are other elements that it wishes to see in a Bill. We have tried to put together a simple framework within which consultation and discussion can take place. That will undoubtedly involve considering whether there are other options, in terms of either the scope of the Bill or some of the operational issues that underpin it.

As for the right hon. Gentleman’s point about other countries, I must make clear that I do not equate a legitimate democratic debate about these matters in this democratic House of Parliament with some of the extraordinary abuses of human rights that we have seen elsewhere in the past, and all too often today. These are very different issues.

[Mr Jack Straw (Blackburn) (Lab)]

Does the Justice Secretary accept that on matters of fundamental human rights, the United Kingdom, under successive Governments, has been impeccable in observing the judgments of the Strasbourg Court, even—for example, in respect of terrorist suspects—when it has disagreed profoundly with those decisions? Long may that continue.

Given that we are talking about the rule of law, does the Justice Secretary also accept that—in breach of ideas of the rule of law that are based on consent—the Strasbourg Court has extended its jurisdiction from fundamental human rights to social and civic rights, for which we have not signed up? As Lord Hoffmann, the former Law Lord, has said, the Court “lacks constitutional legitimacy” in respect of such matters, and

“has no mandate to unify the laws of Europe”

on subjects of this kind.

[Chris Grayling]

I welcome the right hon. Gentleman’s comments. I think it is worth recalling that when the convention was written, back in the 1950s, Stalin was in power in Russia and people were being sent to the gulags without trial. That is what the convention was all about, but over the past 50 or 60 years the Court has moved it away from those fundamentals, and into a territory that many of us find deeply unsettling and wrong. I think there is a compelling case for reform, but while the current situation continues, we must none the less respect the laws of which we are part, and put to Parliament the questions that I am putting to it today.