Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence

Lord Paddick Excerpts

Monday 27th June 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter of Kentish Town, for this debate, and her committee for its report. I also pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Gale, for her tireless work to ensure that this convention was ratified.

This has been a thorough and important debate. I cannot remember how many times, led by the noble Baroness, Lady Gale, we asked the Government: “When are you going to ratify the Istanbul convention?”, and now, as we have heard, they are going to ratify it only partly.

As other noble Lords have said, the UK signed the convention—a legally binding instrument providing a comprehensive framework to counter violence against women and girls—in 2012, and it has taken almost a decade to ratify it. The provisions contained in the convention are there for a reason. The reservation affecting migrant women effectively excludes domestically abused migrant women dependent on their abuser for UK residence—who, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, said, are particularly vulnerable—from the full protection that the convention provides for other victims of domestic abuse. “If I leave my abuser I may be deported” is a dilemma that no woman should have to face.

The question the Government need to answer is: why? The Government may be concerned about claims for leave to remain based on false claims of domestic abuse, but the answer is to have mechanisms in place to ensure that claims are investigated and verified, not to exclude genuine victims from protection. In any case, the convention requires the granting of an autonomous residence permit for such victims only in the event of particularly difficult circumstances. As we have heard from the noble Baronesses, Lady Hayter, Lady Sugg and Lady Gale, more than 80 organisations have signed a letter to the Home Secretary objecting to this reservation, which comes on top of migrant victims of domestic abuse being excluded from the protections in the Domestic Abuse Act. The Istanbul convention is all about equality and non-discrimination. I thank the End Violence Against Women Coalition for its briefing on this.

The Government will say that they are awaiting the outcome of a pilot scheme to provide for migrant victims of domestic abuse, but, as the noble Baroness, Lady Gale, said, it is unclear how this support is dependent on agreeing to provide autonomous residence permits to migrant women in the circumstances set out in the convention. It is a mark of the standing of Southall Black Sisters that the Government chose that organisation for the pilot.

Similarly, under a separate reservation, UK residents who are not UK nationals may not face prosecution in the UK for certain crimes of sexual violence committed abroad, such as marital rape, and any UK resident may not be prosecuted in the UK for forced abortion and sterilisation crimes committed abroad. The convention says a dual criminality requirement for these and other offences may not apply, but the UK Government, through this reservation, are applying the dual criminality requirement that offending behaviour is a criminal offence in the country where it happened and in the UK.

I accept that it is usual practice not to prosecute someone for doing something in another country for which they could not be prosecuted in that country, but the convention sets out where it is necessary to disapply that practice in order to protect women and girls from violence. The Government give an example to justify this reservation of a German national having sex with a 15 year-old partner, since the age of consent in Germany is 14. We have a Crown Prosecution Service—an independent prosecuting authority—that decides on the basis of the likelihood of conviction and whether it is in the public interest to prosecute. Just like the investigation into whether the domestic abuse of a migrant victim is genuine before applying the convention and providing an autonomous residence permit, the CPS would fully consider all the facts before deciding whether a prosecution is in the public interest.

Those resident in the UK are under an obligation to know what the UK accepts as legally permissible, and the UK is entitled to require those who want to live in the UK to abide by our laws if they wish to remain resident. Again, this part of the convention is there for a very good reason; there are safeguards, and therefore there is no good reason for the Government’s reservation. If the Government do not think that these provisions should be part of the convention, why do they not propose amendments to the convention, rather than saying that the UK is a special case where parts of the convention will not apply?

As the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, said, part of the purpose of the convention is to promote and encourage international co-operation. How will the Government’s reservations affect the UK’s ability to encourage other countries to tackle violence against women and girls? The statistics so powerfully quoted by my noble friend Lady Northover show how much work still needs to be done to change attitudes and cultures towards women and girls internationally, as well as at home.

We strongly support the ratification of the convention in full.