Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Macdonald of River Glaven Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 5th February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wigley (PC)]

My Lords, I support Amendments 472 and 473. We have already heard how these amendments could help victims and survivors to seek justice for some of the worst atrocities. We heard from the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and a moment ago from the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, of cases of genocide and crimes against humanity. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, also emphasised the reason why we need to care about justice and accountability for such atrocities. Many may wonder why we, in these islands, are best suited to investigate such crimes. How is it that alleged perpetrators enter the UK? Surely this should be regarded as a matter of national security.

However, my main purpose in speaking today is to bring the debate closer to home. In August 2024, Wales and the UK lost a remarkable man, described by his friends and families as a gentle giant—Ryan Evans. He was from Wrexham, not far from where I live. Ryan was then working as a safety adviser for Reuters in Ukraine. As it happens, Elinor and I took in a family of refugees from eastern Ukraine.

Ryan was in the east of Ukraine, with a news crew from Reuters news agency, when the hotel in which they were staying was hit by a missile. Ryan was killed and nine other people were injured in the attack. So, why was Ryan killed? He worked for Reuters, covering the atrocities committed by Russia in Ukraine. Russia does not want the world to know the scope and nature of those atrocities. Because of that, journalists and media outlets are specifically targeted. A recent report by Truth Hounds and Reporters Without Borders commented that, the case of Ryan Evans,

“stands not only as a testament to the dangers media professionals face but also as a call for accountability and reinforced protections for all members of journalistic teams”.

The killing of Ryan Evans is part of a wider pattern of similar atrocities and war crimes and crimes against humanity. As things stand, and without these important amendments, the family of Ryan have very limited avenues for justice and accountability within the UK. That is because the alleged perpetrators are not British citizens or, indeed, British residents. As such, when we talk about universal jurisdiction, we are talking not only about faraway cases in distant countries. British citizens may well be among victims or survivors, and we cannot continue denying them and their families an avenue for justice here in the UK.

I draw the attention of noble Lords to the words of the family of Ryan Evans—namely, David and Geraldine Evans—who came to Parliament last year and made this plea in support of strengthening the laws. These are words that deserve to be brought to the attention of the House:

“It’s been sixteen months since we had the terrible news of our son Ryan’s death. For those who have lost a loved one suddenly, they will know that you’re in shock for months—even longer; and, as time unfolds, the questions that initially came into your mind come back stronger. In Ryan’s Case questions like - “Was the single missile strike on his hotel deliberately planned? Was he killed instantly, or did he suffer? What is our Government doing to bring the people responsible for killing him to justice?”


They go on to say,

“Some questions we have the answers to, yes, Russia did target our son’s hotel in Kramatorsk deliberately. He died helping to seek the truth, by working with independent journalists, an unarmed non combatant. Russia’s propaganda machine tried to justify the attack and his death with ridiculous statements, as they do in their horrifying attacks on civilians, including non Ukrainian citizens. We seek justice for our son’s murder”.


Their plea concludes with the words:

“We, his family, have a life sentence of grief, which will never go away. The impact on us, his parents, his siblings, his children and wider family and friends is incalculable and life-changing. We look to our government to change the law to work to bring the people responsible for such war crimes and deaths, to justice. As long as one of our family members is alive, we will seek justice and work with our government for help. Ryan would want that; he was a man of integrity, honour and courage, as the following quote reminds us, In the words of Lois McMaster Bujold: ‘The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is a duty of the living to do so for them’”.


We need to do better for the families of victims and survivors, including the family of Ryan Evans. We need to make sure that the law in the UK enables them to seek truth, justice and accountability.

In December 2024, Reuters reported that Ukraine’s security service had named a Russian general it suspects of ordering a missile strike on the hotel and, in Reuters’ words,

“with the motive of deliberately killing employees of”

Reuters. The security service of Ukraine has named a deputy chief of Russia’s general staff as the person who approved the strike that killed Ryan Evans and wounded two of the agency’s journalists. Truth Hounds and Reporters Without Borders have identified two senior leaders in the army units that took the decision to strike the hotel. I understand that these names are known to the British Government.

At this stage, in view of the fact that we are considering the death of a British citizen, I would expect the authorities in the UK, at a minimum, to start investigations into the alleged perpetrators. The options to bring them to account in the UK are clearly limited, but I believe that Amendments 472 and 473 could help ensure that the alleged perpetrators are investigated for war crimes. I ask for the support of noble colleagues in memory of Ryan, for his family and indeed for justice.

[Lord Macdonald of River Glaven (CB)]

My Lords, I want to strongly support these amendments, and I shall be relatively brief. The noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, was kind enough to inform the Committee that in her presence I described the present situation as illogical. In fact, I think I spoke a good deal more strongly than that, and she has been kind enough not to repeat the totality of my remarks.

This is a reform which has been proposed and urged upon successive Governments for years. I found the speech from the noble Lord, Lord Alton, utterly persuasive and completely unanswerable. I take issue with him on only one point, which is when he expressed a little bit of surprise that the CPS would be supporting him. When I was the head of the CPS, I strongly supported this reform. Indeed, shortly after I stepped down from that position, I wrote a column in the Times asking this question: what is it about prosecuting war criminals in this context that the Government do not like? I never received a reply to that question which I understood, and the question is still live.

[Lord Verdirame (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I also offer my support but express some concerns that I believe could be addressed. I do not think I need to say very much as to the reasons I support the amendments, because the speakers before me have all done such a stellar job.

The one point that I would perhaps clarify is that a number of these offences under international law impose on the UK an obligation to prosecute or extradite. The problem that we have is that, in many cases, we cannot extradite. We cannot extradite in some cases because there is no jurisdiction that can, in practice, begin a criminal prosecution. But sometimes we cannot extradite because the jurisdictions to which we would extradite are jurisdictions where the suspect would face the death penalty or torture. In those cases, the individuals would, in effect, find a safe haven here because of our generous human rights protection, to which I think we should all remain committed. So we may end up with individuals who cannot be deported or extradited and whom we cannot prosecute unless we have some reform of universal jurisdiction. That is the need for this change, which would also bring us into line with international obligations.

My concerns are the following. First, we need to remember that universal jurisdiction is the last resort. In a lot of these cases, it is true that the country where the offence was committed, or of which the alleged offender is a national, will not be able to prosecute. However, ideally, the prosecutions should take place in a jurisdiction that has a closer connection with either the offence or the offender. Where that is not possible, we need to look at other options. Another option is prosecution before an international court and tribunal. As we know, under the ICC statute, the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court is always complementary to national jurisdictions. Only in the third instance, and as a last resort, should we look at prosecution under universal jurisdiction. It is only when everything else fails, which unfortunately might happen quite often, that prosecution under universal jurisdiction should be contemplated.

Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord Macdonald of River Glaven Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 12th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Macdonald of River Glaven (CB)]

My Lords, when this question was last before your Lordships, I opposed any alteration to the present law, but I have changed my mind because I have come to believe that our present arrangements are discriminatory and hypocritical. These arrangements benefit one group by conferring upon them effective immunity from prosecution for assisted suicide and damage the rest by withholding that same immunity on what looks like an arbitrary basis.

To explain this, let me go back to my five years as DPP, when around just 100 cases involving assisted suicide came across my desk. We did not prosecute a single one of them. In some cases, this was because the bodies had been cremated in Switzerland and there was no firm evidence of cause of death. This meant that our first test for prosecution—that a realistic prospect of conviction existed—was not met. In other cases, bodies were repatriated for burial, and we had a cause of death—usually massive barbiturate poisoning. Here, the evidential test was clearly met. However, even where it is, there is a second test to consider, because prosecutors are given the discretion to determine whether a prosecution would be in the public interest. In each case, we decided it would not. Why? At a basic level, we felt that a mother, father, son or daughter asked to accompany a loved one to Zurich faced a choice that no jury would regard as real—what to do: to take your terminally ill, suffering daughter yourself and to stay with her while she died, or to leave her to be taken by somebody else? Even presupposing a rational English jury, following proper directions of law from a rational English judge, we believed that that jury would never convict a mother or father in that situation. In all likelihood, they would regard the intrusion of the criminal law into such grief as an abomination.

Since my time, my successors have invariably followed this reasoning except in cases of exploitation or other venality, which were never present in cases I considered. Indeed, my immediate successor, Sir Keir Starmer, was even required by the then judicial committee of your Lordships’ House in its last judgment before becoming the United Kingdom Supreme Court to publish guidance on the factors prosecutors would consider in determining where the public interest lay in assisted suicide cases. Like me, Sir Keir had resisted this step on the grounds that it would constitute the DPP issuing guidance to the public on how to break the law and get away with it.

But that is where we are. We all know that if you assist a suicide in Switzerland and avoid anything the DPP has categorised as an aggravating feature, you may be investigated but you will never be prosecuted. Of course, there are cases where improper pressure, greed or wickedness are involved, but these would remain serious crimes even were this Bill to pass. These few cases aside, it means that the reality is that the vast majority of assisted dying cases abroad have, in effect, been decriminalised, with notable help from the old judicial committee and no involvement from Parliament as a legislative body. That, in itself, is strange, but what is worse is that this dispensation—this de facto right to die—applies only to those with the physical ability, the wherewithal, family and friends willing to risk breaking the law to help them, and the knowledge to do so. Those who are too ill to travel, who do not have the wherewithal, who cannot find anyone to help them or who are simply unaware of the extreme unlikelihood of prosecution are left to suffer in the UK. They are abandoned by a state that is unwilling to put the current law into practice yet equally reluctant to ensure the benefit of its studied inactivity is available to all. In my view, this represents an abuse of the cardinal principle of equality under the law and it can be addressed only by provisions of the sort contained within the Bill.

Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Lord Macdonald of River Glaven Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 2nd June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Macdonald of River Glaven (CB)]

My Lords, I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Harper, on an excellent maiden speech and welcome him warmly.

I broadly welcome the Bill, and I believe that many of the enforcement measures it contains will assist in the fight against organised immigration crime. They had better, because this scourge is a growing threat to the cohesion of our society and the credibility of our democratic institutions. That is true not just here in the UK but across the whole of democratic Europe. People are losing trust, so it is essential that we are realistic and honest about what we face. It is clear that mass migration on the scale we are now seeing and the organised crime gangs that profit from it are drivers of a weakening faith in democratic institutions, bringing the rise of dangerous forms of political extremism—again, not just here but across Europe.

These conditions are fuelling nationalism and xenophobia throughout the democratic world, and the failure of mainstream democratic parties and Governments to deal with the question has played an important part in the installation by popular vote of authoritarian Governments, not just on our own continent but on others. It should be clear to everyone that if parties of the centre, centre-right and centre-left do not deal with this issue and all that flows from it, there is no shortage of parties on the political extremes that will be happy to do so—and if they are ushered in by discontent over migration, they will do much else besides.

The reason why I believe the Bill can only begin to touch the hem of the problem is that the policy challenge is broader and deeper than a simple question of law enforcement. It is the context created by the United Nations refugee convention of 1951 and its protocol of 1967. The refugee convention was created in the shadow of the Second World War and was generally understood to be a response to the horrors of that conflict, particularly to the barriers faced by Jewish people seeking to flee Nazi Germany in the 1930s. The 1967 protocol broadened its terms to include within its compass the entire world.

I will make just one point to illustrate the historical context of the refugee convention and its striking contrast to the world of today. At the time of its enactment in 1951, it was considered that there were around 2.1 million refugees under the mandate of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In 2024, according to the UNHCR, there were no fewer than 122.6 million internally displaced persons around the world and no fewer than 43.7 million refugees. In addition, in the 74 years since the adoption of the convention, the world has become smaller, knowledge of conditions in developed countries more broadly available and travel over distance across seas and whole continents far easier. In the light of that, why would millions of people not seek better lives, more opportunities, and to escape with their families from violence and oppression? What could be more natural? Why would millions of people not avail themselves of the services of organised criminal gangs promising a better future in some newly reachable, unimaginably rich country?

It is in the light of the changes since 1951 that I believe the rubric of the refugee convention must be considered. It says that anyone with a well-founded fear of persecution in their place of abode is entitled under the convention to asylum when they arrive in a contracting state, but that characterisation applies to literally tens of millions of people worldwide and may plausibly be claimed by tens of millions more.

So what are we to do? It is no answer just to shrug; again, we have to be realistic because at some stage we are going to have to deal with this. My own view is that we may have to revisit the refugee convention to make it fit for the modern world—to create an architecture that allows, for example, for the application of quotas between nations and of course the admission of those grievously at risk, so that we may fulfil our humanitarian function without damaging our own social and political cohesion. Discussions are already taking place across Europe about how arrangements under the European Convention on Human Rights may be reordered to allow countries more effectively to define and regulate their borders. As a strong supporter of the European Convention on Human Rights and the Strasbourg court, I urge the Government to become an enthusiastic participant in those discussions.

As long ago as 2016, the distinguished Columbia University academic professor Mark Lilla wrote in his fine book The Once and Future Liberal that parties of the centre-left that espouse identity politics, that atomise people by race, by so-called privilege, sex and gender, building great hierarchies of polarisation and grievance, would never be able to create winning electoral coalitions across socioeconomic divides. Indeed, such an obviously misguided and solipsistic ideology would succeed only in alienating the left’s natural supporters and ushering in an age of populism. The result would be social division and the strengthening of political reaction. Although Professor Lilla once told me that the response of some of his university colleagues to his book was to label him a white supremacist, history has plainly proved him right. Today, a weak and confused response to an unprecedented surge in mass migration holds the same danger. That danger is particularly acute for parties of the centre-left, and we are a maximum of four years away from our next general election.

King’s Speech

Lord Macdonald of River Glaven Excerpts

Wednesday 24th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Macdonald of River Glaven (CB)]

My Lords, I too warmly welcome the noble Lord, Lord Timpson, and I regard his appointment as Prisons Minister as one of the best decisions the new Prime Minister has made since he took office. I also welcome the noble Lord, Lord Hanson, who will be winding up this debate. I wish to address penal policy, and I declare an interest as president of the Howard League for Penal Reform.

After decades during which, if we are honest with ourselves, we have to concede that both the UK’s main political parties were occasionally prone to weaponising criminal justice for electoral gain, the chickens really have come home to roost. Successive Governments created new offences, raised sentences, reduced remission and increased tariffs, and the result has been an epic failure of public policy, filling our crumbling prisons to capacity and forcing the new Lord Chancellor to announce emergency measures on remission—just to keep the system from complete collapse, as she made clear. But this response buys just 18 months until the prisons are full again, so on its own it looks rather like the sort of sticking-plaster politics that the new Prime Minister decried so often in opposition.

It is a crisis that was foreseeable. As we know, Alex Chalk, the estimable former Secretary of State for Justice, who is a great loss to Parliament, warned the Prime Minister that this would happen, and it was left until after the election. But this is precisely how we got here. Headlines before delivery, a sporadic arms race in punitive rhetoric—these were political choices made over many years by Governments of all stripes, quite disconnected from the pragmatic delivery of justice. As everyone now sees, a particular low was the failure to increase prison capacity in the face of a rocketing prison population driven by deliberate public policy. A bit like operating a brewery without manufacturing bottles, for 30 years Governments have been drunkenly good at increasing the flow of inmates, but without creating sufficient new spaces to house them. A government spending review in 2020 promising an impressive 20,000 new prison cells by 2025 has brought us fewer than 4,000, with one year to go. They claimed the full number would be operational by 2030: did anyone really believe that?

There are two reasons why prison-building is unpopular with Governments. First, it is mind-bogglingly expensive: each new cell costs over £600,000 of capital expenditure. At this price, who would choose a prison over a school or a hospital? The second reason is that for the great majority of prisoners on short sentences—those who are not dangerous, and those who are addicts, mentally ill or just a nuisance—prison demonstrably does not work, and successive Governments have known it.

We do not just have the highest prison population in western Europe; we also have some of the worst recidivism rates. For adults released from sentences of less than two years, no less than 50% reoffend. We know from research that recidivism rates are lower for those on community punishments. Why should this be surprising? As a notably right-wing Conservative Home Secretary, Lord Waddington, said many years ago:

“Prison is an expensive way of making bad people worse”.


Bereft of proper facilities for education or rehabilitation, strained to breaking point by austerity and neglect, ludicrously portrayed by some media outlets as holiday camps, and warehousing some of the most damaged people in our society, British prisons should be a stain on our collective conscience. Many of the chief inspector’s reports should be a source of national shame. What a tragic farce, then, that in so many cases they do not even work.

Perhaps something is changing. The Prime Minister is a careful and strategic man. He will have been well aware of the history of the noble Lord, Lord Timpson, as a prison reformer, and from what we know of the Prime Minister’s attachment to planning and process, and we know quite a lot, it seems unlikely that he would have brought someone with the noble Lord’s views into government if he did not intend to give him some space to imagine a fresh penal policy, less focused on incarceration and more directed towards punishment and rehabilitation in the community.

As the noble Lord, Lord Timpson, has said in the past, only around a third of those presently in jail truly belong there: those who are dangerous, are a risk to the public and must be confined for reasons of public safety. Another third should be receiving therapeutic mental health and addiction interventions in the community, and the rest should be on proper rehabilitative community sentences.

This watershed in prison overcrowding is a shared responsibility, and it is important to note this. It will not do for the new Government to try to blame everything on their immediate predecessors. The truth is that the previous Labour Government were also culpable, frequently criticising judges, introducing the policy of imprisonment for public protection and driving up tariffs with no adequate prison building programme to house the inmates their punitive policies were creating. I am confident that under the new Prime Minister and his law officers, attacks on the judges and the Parole Board will cease, but if this new Labour Government do not understand and accept their own predecessors’ role in this debacle, they will hardly start from the right place in what must become a shared process of broad and deep reform and a real change in the way we think about crime and punishment in our country.