European Convention on Human Rights

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Tuesday 19th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

I believe that what we are doing today and the motion we are asking this House to pass—I hope it will pass with support from all parts of the House—will send a clear message about what we believe the article 8 rights mean in terms of where the public interest lies. That is important because, as I say, Parliament has not been able to do that so far. But of course we uphold the principles of human rights, and this is in no way contrary to those principles or to the convention because, as I have said, the convention itself qualifies this particular right.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

As nobody has a dispute about whether article 8 is an absolute—it has always been subject to definition by national courts—why on earth are we debating this today? Is this not just part of the Home Secretary’s general attack on the whole principle of the European Court of Human Rights and the European convention on human rights, which her Back Benchers frequently raise at every possible opportunity?

[Mrs May]

I am a little surprised that the hon. Gentleman stands up to question why Parliament is debating something, as he has usually been keen for Parliament to debate more than it does. The point of this is that clearly—I shall deal with this later—there has been a request from the judiciary that Parliament should make its views clear on this issue, so that they can take that into account when examining cases. It is entirely reasonable that Parliament should give its voice on this matter.

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[Yvette Cooper]

I think that we need action to deport more foreign criminals. That includes more practical action through the UK Border Agency. The Home Secretary and the Minister for Immigration need to explain what they think the motion means. I will come on to that now, because it is an important issue.

The relationship between Parliament and the courts is made explicit in the Human Rights Act 1998. Parliament is actively encouraged to debate the way in which rights should be balanced, and the judiciary is expected to take that into account. Similarly, the British courts cannot strike down an Act of Parliament or primary legislation on immigration, even if they think that it does not comply with the Human Rights Act. Parliament has to decide how to respond if that is the case. That is the legal and democratic framework within which we operate. As part of that, it is reasonable for Parliament to express its view on the balance of different rights, and in particular the balance of different qualified rights. Indeed, we do so all the time through our legislation.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

My right hon. Friend will have heard the intervention of the Chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights. Does she not think that it would have been better if this proposal had been laid on the Table today to enable his Committee to examine it and its implications for our participation in the European convention on human rights?

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend makes an important point, because the Joint Committee on Human Rights does important work. The status of the motion is unclear, because we do not know exactly how the Home Secretary expects it to operate. For example, we know that the new immigration rules affecting foreign criminals, which were set out last week, explicitly refer to how article 8 should be addressed. We believe that is legitimate, but other immigration rules do not make such reference. The rules on foreign criminals also allow the courts to consider exceptional cases, but the process remains deeply unsatisfactory and confused. The Home Secretary has said that she wants to send clear signals to the courts, but she is not sending clear signals to the House.

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[Yvette Cooper]

The Home Secretary talks about clear messages, but she is not giving a clear message to the House, never mind to the courts. She has been confused at every step about what the motion is supposed to do. Time and again, she has been asked whether it is supposed to trump case law or endorse the details of individual immigration rules, on which no opportunity for proper scrutiny has been given, and which have not even gone through the normal processes in the House. It is not clear whether this is supposed to be an endorsement of the existing immigration rules or the future immigration rules. She has not made her position clear.

We would like to be able to support the Home Secretary in her principled statement that article 8 should be discussed by the House and is a matter for legitimate debate. We also want to support her in taking action to deport more foreign criminals, but we urge her to do something about the real problem, which she is still ignoring. She also needs to provide answers to the House about how the detail on other aspects of the immigration rules, particularly on family and other parts of her proposed immigration changes, will be scrutinised, and whether she is trying to bypass the normal scrutiny processes.

The Home Secretary has not chosen a normal approach today. She needs to do more to deport more foreign criminals, but she should not try to subvert normal processes and should be straight with the House about what she is asking it to do.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. In her speech, the Home Secretary referred extensively to rules laid before the House but not prayed against and therefore not debated. Is it in order for us to discuss the contents of those proposed rules, because that is exactly what she did throughout her opening speech?

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Yes.

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[Mr Dominic Raab (Esher and Walton) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), although, unlike him, I welcome this debate and the serious way in which Ministers have identified and targeted the issue of article 8 undermining deportation, especially in relation to foreign national criminals, but also, increasingly, in relation to other elements of our immigration controls. It is worth putting the specific problem of article 8 into perspective. The European convention on human rights was never intended to have any extra-territorial application at all. It was certainly not intended to fetter deportation in any way. That much is very clear from the travaux préparatoires of the convention, all of which are in the public domain.

All of the restrictions have arisen through judicial legislation. Judges in Strasbourg and the UK have stretched existing rights to restrict our capacity to deport. That is contrary to both the separation of powers and basic democratic accountability. It is a serious constitutional matter. It is for elected Members of this House, not unaccountable judges, to decide whether British human rights need to be upgraded from the ones we signed up to in 1950. I should say that, for my part, as a matter of principle and as an elected representative, I support upholding the absolute prohibition on torture. Some will disagree, but I think it is wrong to deport anyone into the arms of a torturing state. On the question of what the right balance might be in terms of deportation and human rights, however, it must be for elected law-makers to decide whether we are going to raise the bar. Politicians can, perfectly respectably, disagree on where the bar should be set, but democrats cannot disagree that it is for legislators to strike that balance.

The fact is that the European Court of Human Rights has been legislating since the 1970s. In the notorious Chahal case in 1996 it was decided that Governments could not deport terrorist suspects if there was a substantial risk of torture in the country to which they were to be returned, but Strasbourg has gone much further. We see new fetters placed on deportation, most recently in the Abu Qatada case. The House will recall that Qatada’s deportation was barred by Strasbourg not because he faced the risk of torture—that was rejected—but because he might not get a fair trial in Jordan. That is a very dangerous precedent. It cannot be Britain’s responsibility to ensure that the justice systems of the world meet British or European standards. Again, it is not for Strasbourg to expand the fetters on deportation through judicial legislation.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Surely the hon. Gentleman is rather overreaching himself here. This country signed the UN convention against torture, as one of many countries that did so, and it therefore specifically becomes part of UK law and there is precedent for that. So deporting somebody to a regime that does not accept the convention against torture and therefore might torture them would be illegal under UK law, leaving aside what might happen to them when they were sent back.

[Mr Raab]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, but he made so many leaps of legal logic that I could not possibly follow them all. The fact is that Strasbourg’s application of a bar on deportation when the individual is at risk of not having a fair trial in their home country is not set out in the UN convention against torture and is not in the European convention on human rights; this is something that Strasbourg, of its own whim, created. The number of appeals by Qatada, at home and in Strasbourg, makes a mockery of the rule of law.

That said, by far the biggest problem we face on deportation arises as a result of the new restrictions under article 8 and the right to family life. If we are being honest, we cannot blame that on Strasbourg, because these are home-grown restrictions; they are a direct result of judicial legislation by UK courts under the previous Government’s Human Rights Act, beyond even the high tide of judicial legislation in case law that has come from Strasbourg. As a result of the Immigration Minister’s direction, the Home Office has produced data showing that 400 foreign criminals a year defeat deportation orders on article 8 grounds. That represents 61% of all successful challenges to deportation orders and this is by far the biggest category.

These cases are not just statistics; they involve real lives. Many shocking cases have been reported in the news, and I wish to refer to just one, that of my constituent Bishal Gurung, a waiter from Esher who was brutally killed by a gang, with his body dumped mercilessly in the river Thames. The perpetrator was convicted of manslaughter and later released. He frustrated his deportation order by citing his right to family life. Let me make it clear: he had no wife, no children and no dependants, yet still he claimed that his family ties trumped the public interest in his deportation. The House can imagine how Bishal Gurung’s family felt about that, and we can imagine what they feel it says about British justice. Now I can at least tell them that the Government and the House of Commons are trying to tackle the problem and reform the law.

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[Pete Wishart]

I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman is being helpful, but that seems to be another interpretation. When he sums up, the Minister for Immigration must tell us exactly what we are voting on this evening, because I do not know. I cannot support the immigration rules in their totality, so if the Government are saying that we have to accept them tonight, I unfortunately cannot support them and will press the matter to a Division. We cannot accept the rules as they stand. This is a very important debate condensed to four hours and a lot of nonsense.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Like the hon. Gentleman, I am confused by much of the debate. Would his interpretation be that whatever the outcome of the rather odd motion the Home Secretary has tabled, it cannot by any stretch of the imagination be construed as an approval of the rules, a direction to courts or as anything other than a vague statement from the Home Secretary of whatever she happens to believe in today?

[Pete Wishart]

The hon. Gentleman might be right—I do not know. We need to hear from the Government exactly what we are voting on. The Home Secretary made three different attempts to tell the House what we will be voting on tonight, but we are no clearer. At some point, we will need to hear from the Government exactly what they are asking us to support. If they want us to support the full rules, I cannot do that. It is a Conservative assault on article 8 and I will not be able to support it this evening.

We need a considered debate on immigration. Hon. Members who have spoken are absolutely right that the matter concerns our constituents, but in Scotland we do not share the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, right-wing Tory view of immigration. Scotland consistently sees these issues differently. Scotland’s population is at an all-time high, but only a few years ago we had great concerns that it was going to fall below the iconic 5 million mark for the first time since the 20th century. That was a real and absolute concern that has been addressed by immigration. We see immigration as something that is valuable to our communities and that is there to be cherished, grown and developed. The minute people set foot in our nation, they are new Scots. They are integrated from day one and that is why we do not have such problems.

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[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

I am grateful to the hon. and learned Member for Torridge and West Devon (Mr Cox) for making a wonderful speech, trying to convince the House that we are actually doing something useful when the Clerk has just explained to us that we are not doing anything very useful whatever. We are deeply indebted to the hon. and learned Gentleman, and the courts are the stronger for the ability to make that kind of argument—to make something utterly irrelevant seem important. It is a skill and a talent that, sadly, only some of us are able to possess.

The Home Secretary probably tabled this rather strange motion because she assumed that it would be a useful bone to feed to her Back Benchers, who are obsessed with the Human Rights Act, with the European convention on human rights and, in some cases, with anything to do with Europe. They follow their obsession every day in The Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and Daily Express. Some of them even read The Sun, I believe, and they continue with that obsession.

We should be slightly more careful than that, however, because the European convention on human rights was established in 1948 to look to a future in Europe based on human rights and a respect for people, rather than on the power of the state to oppress people. We had come out of the Nazi period, the most horrible period in European history, so the popular press, which consistently reports anything to do with human rights as a laughable matter, should remember that many people owe their very lives to the existence of that convention and the European Court of Human Rights, which have had a good effect on many other countries.

The Home Secretary may be saying that immigration law trumps the Human Rights Act and the European convention on human rights, but article 8 has always been qualified and no one has ever disputed that. What would she and others say if the Hungarian Government made a similar statement, announcing that it absolved them of any need to be taken to the European Court of Human Rights for their treatment of Roma people and Traveller people in Hungary? We should think a bit more deeply about the causes of human rights abuse throughout Europe, and be a bit more sympathetic to the European Court of Human Rights and the European convention on human rights.

I shall not speak for long, because others want to get in and the debate is time-limited, but the Home Secretary placed in the Vote Office last week an explanatory statement on her immigration proposals, and it ranges far wider than the question of just deporting foreign criminals. It skates over the important issue of how children and families are treated in the right to family life. She has chosen to interpret that right in the narrow sphere of the individual—usually male—criminal who has served a sentence, left prison, is hopefully a reformed character and then asserts that he has a right to family life in the UK, giving stern warnings that she will not accept any of that stuff any more and they are going to be on their way. She might care to look at what the London School of Economics did in considering the effects of article 8, and what others have done in this respect.

Baroness Hale has said that a child cannot be held responsible for the moral failings of their parents. That is a profound statement that emphasises that children do have rights in these situations. They have rights not to be deported, and their parents have rights to enjoy the company of their spouse or partner. Surely that is what we should be looking at. What is the effect on those children of one parent being removed? Some of us have been through the sad experience of arguing that case on behalf of constituents. One partner and their children do not want to be removed to another jurisdiction, so they remain here knowing full well that the missing partner—the ex-prisoner—will not be allowed into this country for at least 10 years. That is a huge proportion of a child’s life and experience. We should be slightly more liberal and understanding about these issues.

Obviously in some of the extreme cases, such as that cited by my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw), one would have no sympathy with what those individuals have achieved, but looking at extreme cases does not make for good law. A serious examination of the totality makes for a better example of good law. That is why I suggested that we should refer the whole issue to the Joint Committee on Human Rights.

[Pete Wishart]

As usual, the hon. Gentleman is making a powerful case. He, like me, will remember the debates of years ago when we argued the same type of case. In those days, we would be joined by the Liberals, but today we have heard not one speech by a Liberal Member on a very important issue that they used almost to scream about. We have not had even one intervention by a Liberal Member. Two of them came wandering into the Chamber, had a little look around, and disappeared again. Is the hon. Gentleman as surprised as I am that we have heard nothing from the Liberals today?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I am sorry to disappoint the hon. Gentleman, but I cannot help him by describing what the Liberal Democrats are doing today, because I am not responsible for them. However, having been involved in a lot of human rights, anti-terrorism and immigration debates over the many years I have been in Parliament, I know that there are different allies in different Parliaments. Sometimes there are Conservatives one agrees with, sometimes there are Liberals one agrees with, and sometimes there is nobody one agrees with, but that’s life, and we plough on.

[Mr Cash]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point, because he and I have agreed on several matters, including the Chagos islanders. May I offer him the thought that absence of the Liberal Democrats may have something to do with the lack of clarity in the motion? If it was as clearly expressed as I would like, notwithstanding the Human Rights Act and all that goes with it, I rather suspect that there might be some difficulty for those on the Liberal Democrat Benches, because they would want it to be less clear than I would.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I respect him for standing up for his principles and acknowledge that he and I have agreed on quite a lot of occasions, particularly on the disgraceful treatment of the Chagos islands by all Governments over very many years. We hope that the European Court of Human Rights, which is now hearing that case, will come to a good judgment, which we expect imminently.

When I intervened on the hon. Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab) about the torture and ill-treatment of people in other jurisdictions, he did not agree with me, and that is fair enough; he does not have to. However, he should understand that the European convention was a very important step in improving human rights standards around the world. The principle of a continent-wide human rights court has been copied to some extent on other continents—for example, central America has such a court. The idea of an international convention such as the United Nations convention against torture is a very powerful one. That is why I disagreed so very strongly with Tony Blair, when he was Prime Minister, on his agreeing to the deportation of people to jurisdictions that had not signed the international convention on torture. That undermined the convention, damaged the human rights of the individual, and damaged us as a country that is supposed to stand up for human rights and justice.

I cannot really describe what we are debating today, and I do not think that the Home Secretary can either. I look forward to a full debate on her proposed immigration rules, because some of them will have a devastating effect on the family life of very poor people in this country who have migrated here, work hard, clean our floors, look after our children, drive our trains, and help our industries to get along. We should also remember that immigration in this country has helped to create our relatively high standards of living. It does the House no credit when people condemn all immigration as an economic problem. Immigration is an economic benefit to our society, and it is about time we publicly recognised that.