Draft Recognition and Enforcement of Judgments (2019 Hague Convention etc.) Regulations 2024

Liam Fox Excerpts

Tuesday 21st May 2024 General Committees

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Gareth Bacon)]

I beg to move,

That the Committee has considered the draft Recognition and Enforcement of Judgments (2019 Hague Convention etc.) Regulations 2024.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Pritchard. The draft regulations form part of the implementing framework for the 2019 Hague convention on the recognition and enforcement of judgments in civil or commercial matters. They will amend the Civil Jurisdiction and Judgments Act 1982 to incorporate the convention into domestic UK law.

Following unanimous support in response to a Government consultation, the UK signed the 2019 Hague convention on 12 January this year. It was laid before Parliament on 25 March for treaty scrutiny, which was completed last week without objection. The UK Government are now preparing to ratify the convention to bring it into force between the UK and the existing parties, which will be the European Union, Ukraine, Uruguay and all European Union member states apart from Denmark. This legislation is instrumental to the UK joining the convention and needs to be in place prior to ratification to ensure that the UK can meet its obligations under the convention.

The convention will come into force for the UK just over a year after ratification. The Government aim to complete ratification as soon as possible this summer, which will allow the UK to start applying the 2019 Hague convention with the other parties a year later. The UK stands to be an early adopter of the convention, as a leader in the field of private international law.

I turn to the content and aims of the draft regulations, which will implement the 2019 Hague convention in UK law and facilitate the operation of the convention once it enters into force. The purpose of the convention is to establish a set of rules about whether a civil or commercial judgment made in the court of one country may be recognised and enforced in another. Without a uniform scheme, each country’s own domestic rules determine whether a judgment from another country will be recognised and enforced there. Those rules vary from country to country, which can give rise to uncertainty and a range of challenges for effective cross-border enforcement. The convention addresses many of those challenges by providing a uniform set of rules that all parties to the convention agree to apply with each other.

Joining the 2019 Hague convention will provide greater clarity and confidence for businesses and individuals in disputes, will reduce costs, will encourage international trade and will enhance access to justice. It will also provide greater predictability as to whether a UK judgment can be enforced abroad. This will encourage businesses to choose the UK’s world-beating courts for their international litigation, further increasing the attractiveness of the UK for international dispute resolution.

I turn to the detail of the draft regulations, which make implementing provisions for how the convention will operate in the UK. These comprise three key elements.

First, the draft regulations will create a registration requirement so that anyone seeking to recognise and enforce a foreign judgment in the UK under the convention has to apply to a UK court to register the judgment first. The applicant will be required to set out initial evidence that their judgment is eligible for recognition and enforcement under the convention. That will create a form of safeguard that enables the court briefly to assess whether the grounds for recognition and enforcement under the convention have been met, rather than its being automatic. However, it is designed to be as light-touch as possible; it is not akin to new proceedings. This is a well-understood, proven model with which legal practitioners and UK courts are already familiar. It is used consistently across the existing recognition and enforcement regime in the UK. Once the judgment is successfully registered, it will be treated as a judgment made by that court.

Secondly, the draft regulations will give either party the right, once a UK court has decided whether to register a judgment under the 2019 Hague convention, to apply to have that decision set aside if they do not agree with it. This provides an opportunity for either party to ask the court to reassess its decision in the light of any additional information. This is a form of recourse similar to an appeal. The setting aside route is well established for recognition and enforcement decisions, where the court will examine only a limited amount of information at the registration stage. This is deliberate, in order to make the process swift and not unnecessarily overburden the courts. However, there will be cases in which the court might not have had all the relevant facts. The decision can then be made again with further information provided.

[Sir Liam Fox (North Somerset) (Con)]

I am generally supportive of the Government’s case. If the aim is partly to bring parties in dispute to UK courts for dispute resolution, have the Government made any assessment of the impact that that will have on the capacity of our court system?

[Gareth Bacon]

We believe that we have sufficient capacity to cope. Actually, we are speeding up the process, because these cases would have to be taken to a UK court anyway. Taking this approach will mean that the rules have been agreed in advance; we believe that that will streamline capacity and make things easier.

Thirdly, the draft regulations will ensure that foreign judgments do not make their way into the intra-UK recognition and enforcement system in the Civil Jurisdiction and Judgments Act 1982. The 1982 Act’s rules govern the recognition and enforcement of judgments between the different jurisdictions of the UK; they allow judgments made in one UK jurisdiction to be near-automatically enforced in another.

The draft regulations will exclude judgments registered under the 2019 Hague convention from that mechanism. This is to ensure that courts in each jurisdiction— Scotland, Northern Ireland and England and Wales—can individually decide whether to recognise a particular foreign judgment. In practice, that means that although a judgment from a court in England can be near-automatically recognised and enforced in Scotland under the 1982 Act, a foreign judgment registered in an English court under the 2019 Hague convention will need to be registered separately in a Scottish court under the convention.

The 1982 Act also implements other conventions to which the UK is already a party, including the 2005 Hague convention on choice of court agreements. That convention includes recognition and enforcement rules for judgments given where an exclusive choice of court agreement was in place. This is an agreement stating that a dispute between parties will be determined exclusively by a specified court or by the courts of a specified country.

To ensure consistency with the UK’s recognition and enforcement regime and to avoid confusion for users, the draft regulations will make some amendments to the implementing provisions for the 2005 Hague convention, to bring them into line with the approach taken for the 2019 Hague convention. This includes amending the recourse route from a right of appeal to the application to set aside that I have described, as well as excluding the 2005 Hague convention from the same provisions in the 1982 Act from which we are excluding the 2019 convention: those that provide for the recognition and enforcement of judgments between the UK’s jurisdictions.

The draft regulations are an important step in implementing the 2019 convention. They will strengthen the framework for the international recognition and enforcement of judgments, giving UK businesses and citizens greater clarity, certainty and confidence as they work, live and operate across international borders. I hope that the Committee will join me in supporting them.

Domestic Abuse Bill

Liam Fox Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Karen Bradley]

I will not, if the hon. Lady will forgive me, only because I have run out of interventions. Now that I am on the Back Benches, I have to get used to not being able to take all interventions.

The other challenge is the multi-agency approach, which, again, has been talked about. We cannot arrest our way out of this problem. We have to deal with it through prevention and education. There is a role for so many agencies and organisations in ensuring that domestic violence is tackled. I recall, when I was Minister, visiting the domestic violence team at the A&E in Royal Stoke University Hospital. A nurse there, Mandy Burton, received a national nursing award for her work in bringing to the A&E department a focus on domestic violence, and on identifying it. That was revolutionary at the time —this was 2015. We need all agencies to work together to make sure that they identify domestic violence.

[Dr Liam Fox (North Somerset) (Con)]

I hesitate to take up my right hon. Friend’s time, but would she accept that the medical profession has a key role to play? One of the places where physical violence will first be picked up is accident and emergency; one of the first places where non-physical, psychological, violence will first be picked up is in general practice. Is there not a case for improving education, so that there is a high index of suspicion of domestic violence in both general practice and hospitals?

[Karen Bradley]

My right hon. Friend speaks with personal experience and great authority on this matter. He is absolutely right. So many agencies will have interaction with victims of domestic abuse. They need to understand the signs and indications, and need the ability and strength to intervene, because that may be an early point at which we can get in, before domestic abuse that may appear to some to be low-level—there is no such thing as low-level abuse—turns into something horrendous. We know the number of homicides a year; we need to make sure that we intervene as soon as possible, in order to prevent the very worst tragedies.

That brings me on to the Bill. It is right to describe it as landmark legislation. Putting into statute a definition of domestic abuse is incredibly important. My right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead talked about needing to have one definition that was recognised across all agencies and across the law. That is how we will help to identify this abuse, and get services and support in the right places at the right time. I referred to the civil powers; having more of them is very important. The civil powers mean that the victim can stay in her home with her children, while the perpetrator is removed. If abuse does not meet the criminal test, it may still meet the civil test, and of course breach of that civil law becomes a crime, which gives the police the power to act.

I am very pleased about the introduction of the Domestic Abuse Commissioner. When I was in the Home Office, we introduced the Modern Slavery Act 2015 and the Independent Anti-slavery Commissioner, who often said things that were uncomfortable for Government, but was absolutely right to say them. It is right that we should have one person working for all victims of domestic abuse.

I am pleased to see the extension of the offence of coercive control to Northern Ireland; from my previous role, I know how important that is. That reminds me of the sentence that I have probably said far more often than any other in this Chamber in the past few years: it is time for the parties in Stormont to come back together and form a Government, and do the right thing by the people who elected them. In the absence of such a Government, it is right that we take steps in the Bill to make sure that coercive control is properly recognised and dealt with in Northern Ireland.

The Bill will make a difference only if we see outcomes from it. The outcomes in my county of Staffordshire over the past few years—since I was first involved in this field—have been really quite incredible. Our police and crime commissioner, Matthew Ellis, has really made the issue his focus during his stewardship of the police. He introduced a multi-agency approach, and the New Era service, which gives victims holistic support. Last year, it supported 25,000 people in Staffordshire. That is a great credit to him, and I pay tribute to him for the work he has done.

Victims need the power to speak openly, and the police need the tools to bring persecutions, so that perpetrators are punished. When I was a Minister in the Home Office, I recall clearly making a speech for a colleague, as we all do. I talked about my work in the Home Office. One of the people there, who had been enjoying a lovely dinner, stopped eating, and at the end of the speech she asked me for a private word. It was very emotional. She said, “Twenty-five years ago, I was a victim of coercive control, though I didn’t know it at the time. I’m out of that relationship now, but everything you described was my life.” She said, “I remember the police saying to me, ‘We know he’s abusing you and treating you in a way he shouldn’t, but there’s nothing we can do. The best we can hope for is that when he comes home drunk tonight, he kicks the door down; then we can arrest him for criminal damage.’”

We need victims to know that the police have weapons, tools and ways to help them, because they put their trust in the police—we all do, quite rightly. We need to make sure that the police have the weapons that they need, so that they can deliver. That is how we will help victims to bring things out into the open, and put an end to domestic abuse.

Assisted Dying (No. 2) Bill

Liam Fox Excerpts

Friday 11th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[Dr Liam Fox (North Somerset) (Con)]

I completely understand the motives of those who have introduced the Bill. Anyone who has watched a loved one die in terrible suffering will entirely understand why they have introduced their proposals, and no one should impugn their motives. I have to say, however, that it is all too easy to open a Pandora’s box, with utterly unintended consequences that may be very different from the primary intentions of those promoting the Bill.

I want to make a few comments based on my experience as a doctor. Doctors can come under enormous pressure from relatives and from their own emotions to hasten the death of a patient whom they believe to be suffering too much. I worked in Glasgow Royal Infirmary during the early days of the marrow transplant programme. We had to give patients huge doses of sometimes very crude treatments, and when I was sitting with a young patient, there was very often a strong temptation to end their suffering. Some of them went on to survive, which is a lesson to doctors not to make judgments too hastily. I believe that anything that increases such pressures on doctors opens up an ethical trap that we do not want.

We already have laws relating to the concept of double effect. If a patient is suffering, we can give them medication whose primary aim is to alleviate their suffering, even though its effect will be to shorten their life. That is very different ethically and morally from giving a patient something that is primarily designed to kill them.

We need to understand that assisted dying can have an effect on the medical profession. Studies from the Netherlands and the United States on doctors who have performed or assisted at assisted suicides have shown that the medical professionals concerned had

“high levels of emotional discomfort, distress and feelings of overwhelming burden”.

There is also a fundamental change in the doctors’ relationship with patients. The No. 1 rule is “Do no harm”. If a patient arrives unconscious or in a coma, their family needs to know—as the patient themselves would want to know—that the doctor will do them no harm and will not come under any pressure to do so for one reason or another. I fully understand that the Bill does not cover that, but it does fundamentally change the relationship between doctors and patients, and that change cannot be undone once it has been made. We are talking about overturning 2,000 years of the Hippocratic oath.

The hon. Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) made an absolutely wonderful and emotionally charged speech. It set out very clearly the risks for another group of patients that doctors deal with—the vulnerable. In his moving article at the weekend, the Archbishop of Canterbury spoke about the Age UK research and stated:

“It is impossible to ensure that they and other vulnerable people would not be placed under pressure to end their lives prematurely in ways that proposed safeguards cannot hope to detect.”

It was noted earlier that people feeling that they are a burden when making a decision to end their lives prematurely is only one factor, but that is one reason too many. The answer is not to make it easier to kill people; we need societal change to prevent people from feeling a burden in their elderly years.

Finally—I am aware of the time—there has been an argument about whether the Bill would make it easier for euthanasia to be introduced in this country. Doctors in the Netherlands who have experience of assisted suicide recognise that failures will occur from time to time. Those failures make up around 7% to 16% of cases, and include failure to induce coma, or patients who come out of coma before the process is finished. The Royal Dutch Medical Association recommends that a doctor be present when assisted suicide is performed in the manner proposed in this Bill, precisely so that euthanasia can be performed, if necessary, if the process fails. In practice it is impossible to distinguish between assisted dying and euthanasia. If we have one, because of the failures of process we will inevitably get the other. I do not believe that that is an improvement to our society. However well-meaning the proponents of this Bill may be, they will open a Pandora’s box that will fundamentally change who we are, how we are as a society, and how we relate to the medical profession. I believe that none of that will be to the benefit of future generations.