Human Rights and Civil Liberties

Lord Lexden Excerpts

Thursday 2nd July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lexden (Con)]

My Lords, I have difficulty in getting used to the fact that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, is no longer addressing us from the Government Front Bench, of which he was such a conspicuous adornment. I thank him for bringing this important debate before us today. I would like to offer just a few comments on some aspects of human rights in his debate.

First, I make clear my support for the European Convention on Human Rights. As is well known, the convention owed much to the legal acumen and drafting skills of an influential Tory, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe—who, by the way, was a man of rather gloomy disposition, prompting a little ditty among his colleagues at the Bar:

“The nearest thing to death in life,

Is David Patrick Maxwell Fyfe”.

Churchill warmly welcomed and indeed applauded the convention. Speaking in Strasbourg on 17 August 1949, he expressed his special pleasure that the European court that was to be established would, in his words,

“depend for the enforcement of its judgments on the individual decisions of the States now banded together in this Council of Europe”.

Among its many contributions to progress in our land, the convention has assisted powerfully in the removal of gross inequalities and social stigmas that so long blighted our society and to which the noble and learned Lord made reference. It has enlarged and protected our freedoms. Speaking in the debate on the Queen’s Speech on 1 June, my noble friend Lord Black of Brentwood, executive director of the Telegraph Media Group, stressed the importance of Article 10 in safeguarding the precious freedom of the press, which politicians are often sorely tempted to try to weaken. Because of the reliance that newspapers have been able to place on Article 10, safeguarding freedom of expression, they have been able to serve us and our democracy more faithfully and fearlessly. There surely could be no more telling or powerful example of the convention’s importance.

A profoundly important process of consultation on the future of human rights legislation in our country is now under way. It is surely essential that this consultation should exclude no political party, organisation or individual that may wish to contribute to it. We need to achieve a wide consensus about the shape of our future arrangements in this fundamental department of our constitutional and legal affairs—indeed, in all departments, as my noble friend Lord Forsyth of Drumlean mentioned earlier today.

It is good to see the phrase “one nation” back in fashion. We owe it, incidentally, not to Disraeli but to Stanley Baldwin, who was the first to use it, saying in a speech on 4 December 1924 that his party, then known as the Unionist Party, needed to bring together,

“those two nations of which Disraeli spoke two generations ago; union among our own people to make one nation of our own people”.

To achieve a one-nation approach for the construction of a British Bill of Rights, fully compatible with the European convention, do not we need to ensure that all parts of our country and all relevant interests within them are fully consulted?

I refer to just one of the crucial issues which needs to feature prominently in the process of consultation—the uneven enforcement of certain rights in our country today. The existence of this issue is in part a consequence of the establishment of devolved legislatures and Executives. Northern Ireland, a part of our country in which I am deeply interested, has been affected particularly significantly. Encouraged by my friend the noble Lord, Lord Lester of Herne Hill, I have on a number of occasions brought before your Lordships’ House the wholly unsatisfactory state of affairs that now exists in Northern Ireland in relation to the law of defamation. For the first time in our history, Northern Ireland has a different libel law from that in England and Wales, because the Northern Ireland Executive refused without giving any reasons to implement the Defamation Act 2013. One most serious and baleful result, as the noble Lord, Lord Lester, recently stressed in a fine lecture, is that publishers have to meet different standards in different parts of the country, even though free speech is a fundamental right. Ought not a fundamental right to be given effect in the same way throughout the realm? As things stand, Northern Ireland seems destined to stand apart from the United Kingdom for years to come.

In November last year, the independent Law Commission in Northern Ireland began a consultation on the law of defamation that ended on 20 February this year. A few weeks later, the Law Commission was effectively shut down. Its work has been subsumed within the Northern Ireland Department of Justice—part of the very Executive who are blocking Northern Ireland’s access to a major right in its current form enjoyed by the rest of us. It is the same story with same-sex marriage. My gay friends in Great Britain can get married if they wish to—my gay friends in Northern Ireland cannot. An application for judicial review has recently been lodged in the Northern Ireland courts. There are other examples of serious disparities in human rights between Northern Ireland and the rest of the country. Are we content that such a state of affairs should continue to exist, or do we want to do something about it? It is an issue that those preparing the ground for a British Bill of Rights must not dodge.