CIA: Torture

Lord Thomas of Gresford Excerpts

Tuesday 16th December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Avebury (LD)]

My Lords—

[Lord Thomas of Gresford (LD)]

My Lords—

[The Lord Privy Seal (Baroness Stowell of Beeston)]

The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, has been very patient. We will allow him to ask his question and then we should have time for at least one more noble Lord.

Hong Kong

Lord Thomas of Gresford Excerpts

Thursday 16th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Thomas of Gresford (LD)]

I recall the foreboding that I felt in the late spring of 1989 over the protests in Tiananmen Square. We know what happened. Although they enjoyed much popular support, the protests were suppressed. More than 300 people were killed and many more were injured and wounded. Foreign journalists were banned. Western Governments imposed economic sanctions and arms embargoes. I took part in the protest march around Causeway Bay and Happy Valley the following year on the first anniversary. That march still takes place.

There is no comparison between the freedoms enjoyed today in Hong Kong and the repressions of Beijing in 1989. First, there is freedom of assembly. It is true that on the 28 September, at the beginning of Occupy Central, the police used pepper spray, tear gas and batons to disperse the crowds, but the reaction was such that on the following day, the riot police were withdrawn. For two weeks, non-violent demonstrations were tolerated and spread. They spread to other parts. The only real threat of violence came from the triad groups in Mong Kok. There is an assumption that their involvement was encouraged by the authorities. That may or may not be true. Knowing something of these groups from practice in the criminal courts in Hong Kong, I had predicted they would get involved in any violence going—and indeed they did.

There have been isolated incidents as the police have this week removed barriers. On Wednesday last, some journalists complained of being punched and dragged by police officers in the Lung Wo Road. In the evening, Hong Kong police officers took the social worker Ken Tsang, a protest leader, to a quiet part of Tamar Park and beat him up. However, that has not been suppressed. Seven policemen have been suspended, the case has gone to the High Court for a mandatory injunction, the Independent Police Complaints Council has been informed and there have been protests by Amnesty International and the Hong Kong Bar Council, among others. In other words, the rule of law has been maintained and strengthened. There is freedom of speech, because all those events have been fully reported.

Indeed, the election of the next Chief Executive by universal suffrage in 2017 will be a significant step towards democratic government. Unfortunately, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress in Beijing has sought to set boundaries on the method of election: namely, as the noble Lord, Lord Luce, who must be congratulated on obtaining this debate, said, that there should be no more than two or three candidates; that they will be nominated by the nominating committee, and that each candidate’s nomination will require the consent of more than 50% of the committee, as opposed to the eighth of the membership of the committee when the previous Chief Executive was elected.

The present disturbances are fuelled not so much by demands for freedom, as in 1989, but by fears that the freedoms enjoyed by Hong Kong people might be taken away in future. Another factor is economic inequality. The World Bank has indicated that Hong Kong billionaires’ combined net worth equals 80% of the city’s gross domestic product. The disparity of wealth between richest and poorest as measured by the Gini coefficient is the greatest in Asia. The well educated young people on the streets of Hong Kong see no prospect of owning property themselves in the foreseeable future and fear that their interests are not represented at the decision-making level.

But as in Tiananmen Square, the protesters have no end game. They have made their point: that unless their views are considered, they have the capacity to disrupt the smooth running of the city. Today, they are still occupying 2.3 kilometres of the city’s streets. They should now hold back. Now is the time for compromise.

The Government themselves have been dilatory and entirely reactive. They are relying upon the protest movement losing public support, as people become increasingly irritated by the disruption of their livelihoods. Meetings with the Hong Kong Federation of Students have stalled. In the pending public consultation on the election process, the Hong Kong Government say that they will be seeking common ground and wish to forge consensus in a rational and pragmatic manner.

I suggest that these are the areas to be explored. First, can the nominating committee which chooses the candidates be elected to represent a broader spectrum of public opinion? At the moment, any prospective candidate is bound to tailor his platform towards the dominating business element. Secondly, is the new requirement that, to be nominated, a candidate must gain more than 50% support of the nominating committee desirable or sustainable? Thirdly, is there any justification for restricting the number of candidates to three? Fourthly, should political groupings be encouraged to put forward candidates for the committee to consider? A source of much friction in the current system is that a Chief Executive without a party behind him lacks political support in the legislature. At the Hong Kong Association luncheon at the Shard last Tuesday, I asked the Secretary for Justice, Mr Rimsky Yuen, about this. He said that there was no reason why they should not put forward candidates.

It would be timely for both the Chinese and the Hong Kong Governments to reassure Hong Kong that its freedoms, which now include free access to the internet and social communications such as Facebook, will be preserved. There is a Chinese saying that a strong flow of water should not be blocked but channelled. The Government might also consider Mr Gladstone’s precept: trust the people, do not fear the people. Hong Kong is never going to compromise its prosperity and security by electing a Chief Executive who is completely anti-Beijing. The grievances of these young people should be addressed. They should never be suppressed.

Syria and the Use of Chemical Weapons

Lord Thomas of Gresford Excerpts

Thursday 29th August 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Thomas of Gresford]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Brennan, talked about the elimination of all chemical weapons. It is a chilling thought that the Syrian Arab Republic is one of only five states that have neither signed nor acceded to the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1992. The others are Somalia, North Korea, Angola and Egypt. Two states have signed but not ratified the convention: Myanmar and Israel. So there are two countries in close proximity, one of which has not signed or ratified the convention—Syria—and the other, Israel, that has not ratified it.

The prohibition of chemical weapons was not novel, even at the time of the Geneva Convention of 1925. The Brussels Convention of 1874 prohibited the employment of poison or poisoned weapons and the use of arms, projectiles or material to cause unnecessary suffering. Its aims were restated in 1899 in the Hague Convention, whose parties declared their agreement to abstain from the use of projectiles the sole object of which was the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases. Of course, that convention proved futile in the First World War, which resulted in 100,000 deaths and 1 million casualties from gas.

The 1925 convention was more successful. Many of us in this House may remember the constrictions on the cheeks and the smell of rubber from the wartime infant gas masks, some of which were bizarrely made to look like Mickey Mouse. We had cause to be thankful that gas, although expected, was not widely used—or used at all in the Second World War in the European theatre. But it was used by the Italians against the Ethiopians in 1936, by the Japanese against the Chinese in 1938 and of course, as many speakers have mentioned, in the Iraq/Iran war in the 1980s. There must be the gravest concern to ensure that it is not used in any Syrian conflict.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, posed the question: what happened? We must find out not merely whether chemical weapons were used but exactly what happened. There are assertions in the document produced as the UK Government’s legal position which can be challenged. For example, it is said that the large-scale use of chemical weapons by the regime in a heavily populated area is a war crime, and it is likely that the regime will seek to use the weapons again. The question that must have occurred to your Lordships when we had news of these terrible events was why on earth would Assad, the president, use poison gas of some form or another when the United Nations investigators were actually there? Why would he do it?

The only solution I can think of is that somewhere below him in the chain of command some commander, maybe of a relatively junior rank to whom responsibility for guarding these weapons or using them had been delegated, had taken leave of his senses and employed them in the shocking way that we have heard. If that is so, what is our response to be? Is it without further investigation simply to bomb and shell or strike at targets in Syria with the inevitable consequence that innocent civilians would be killed?

I have heard Ministers, the Prime Minister and others say that it is all a question of judgment. But judgment normally follows the evidence. Judgment does not come first. A great deal more investigation must be undertaken into what happened to ascertain the facts before we can inflict on the population of Syria that which is proposed.

The responsibility to protect doctrine, which it is suggested was a cloak for the Government in earlier conflicts—and I will not go into that—is not a new idea. It has been at the heart of United Nations General Assembly discussions since 1946. The International Law Commission spent more than 70 years before the 2005 United Nations conference discussing the principles that should be applied. But it concluded, even after all its considerations in 2005, that the Security Council is still the only means through which a state can legally intervene in the affairs of another state. It is essential that, when the evidence is clear, the matter goes back to the Security Council because I believe that if the evidence is clear to the world all members of the Security Council will unite in their condemnation of something that has been recognised as abhorrent for getting on for 150 years.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Thomas of Gresford Excerpts

Monday 14th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grocott]

My Lords, I thought that it would be helpful to today’s discussion if we cast our minds back a couple of weeks to the elections that took place across Britain. I am referring in particular to the elections regarding the 10 directly elected mayors. As the House will remember, the suggestion was that there should be 10 directly elected mayors in 10 of the great cities of Britain. This proposal was supported by the leadership of the three main political parties, which is always a rather worrying state of affairs. It was argued that it would be a far more democratic system that would provide greater accountability and represent change, and these days we are always in favour of change. I need hardly remind the House of the results of those elections by the good people of Birmingham, Coventry and sundry other cities. When presented with this proposition, roughly three-quarters of the electorate could barely stifle a yawn before they changed the subject. The quarter, roughly, who actually went to the polling station voted pretty overwhelmingly and, I am happy to say, nine out of 10 said, “No thank you very much. We don’t think our present system is broken. We will carry on as before”.

I will leave noble Lords to their own judgment as to the relevance of that to the discussion of Lords reform because so much is unknown about Lords reform, despite all the discussions we have had so far. We know that the Government will probably introduce a Bill, but we do not know whether the Bill will be largely the draft Bill or will be substantially changed in the light of the Select Committee’s report. We do not know when it will be introduced. We certainly do not know what its passage will show or whether or when it will reach this House. We do not know whether the Parliament Act will be applied, if necessary, and we do not know whether there will be a referendum at the end of everything.

There are a lot of do not knows, but I would like to put to the House something that I do know, I think. We cannot judge how the thing will end, but we can make a pretty educated guess on the direction of travel. I am sure that it is pretty much everyone’s experience, as well as mine, that the direction of travel on this debate about whether we should have an elected House has been slowly but inexorably moving towards those of us who say that an elected second Chamber would be bad for our constitution. If there is anyone around who previously thought that an appointed House along the present lines, but not quite, was a good idea, but who then read the draft Bill and thought, “Eureka! I used to favour an appointed House but, my word, this is a cracking little Bill and has certainly convinced me”—I have not met that person yet—perhaps they could drop a note to the Government because I am sure they would be very pleased to hear that.

I do not want to win this battle as, simply on the basis of procedural wrangles, it threatens to be deals between political parties or perhaps even between Front Benches. I want to win this argument because I want to see it concluded and put to bed for a very substantial period. It is very important that that happens. Perhaps I may be partisan because, obviously, the party I care about more than any other, and always have, is my dear old Labour Party. Should we win the next election, as I fervently hope, and should this attempt at Lords reform fail, I hope that we will not find ourselves mired in a commitment to introduce another Bill which will take an inordinate amount of time and trouble to no discernable benefit to the electorate. Perhaps I should remind those newer members of my party who seem to think that an elected second Chamber is in our DNA and is what the Labour Party has always believed in and campaigned for, that they do not have memories anything like as good as those of some of us on these Benches. I actually took the precaution—I never thought I would—of reading the 11 election manifestos of my dear old party since 1970. That is an arbitrary date, and was the first general election that I lost. Since 1970, there have been 11 general elections. Only twice did the Labour Party have a commitment to a directly elected second Chamber in its manifesto. Incidentally, we lost both those elections. I do not claim that there is a direct relationship between the two things but it may be worth a note of caution.

I commend to the House the reference to Lords reform in the 2005 general election manifesto. I expect the ears of my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer to prick up at this. The 2005 Labour manifesto said:

“Labour believes that a reformed Upper Chamber must be effective, legitimate and more representative without challenging the primacy of the House of Commons”.

I think that is a tremendous script and am sure my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer will also think so. We ought to; we wrote it.

Without being overconfident, I am confident about the way that things are progressing because I think we are winning the argument. I will not repeat points that have been made already but we have surely conclusively won the argument on powers. Clause 2 of the draft Bill is ridiculous. It just asserts the primacy of the House of Commons with absolutely no evidence to explain how that would be sustained. The Government have still failed to answer the question that others and I have put repeatedly in public—that is, parliamentary—and private meetings, which is simply this, on powers. If one House votes to go to war and the other House votes not to go to war, following a request from the Government for war powers, where on earth does that leave the Government?

It is no use saying that it works abroad. It is the weakest argument of the lot to say that things work in other systems overseas. For the most part, other systems overseas have written constitutions that precisely delineate the powers of the two Chambers. We are not in that position. We are in a position in which the two Chambers have pretty much the same kinds of powers, but most of the time this House simply decides not to exercise them to the full. That is why we have a good relationship between the two Chambers. Therefore, I will not trouble the House. The point about powers has been well argued already.

There has been no attempt to argue otherwise by the Government, or by the previous Government, under Jack Straw. I had the same sense of frustration arguing with Ministers then as I have now. They refused to address the problem, just saying, “Oh, we have the Parliament Act so everything will be all right”.

The other argument is more difficult but I think that those of us who are against a directly elected House have won it. It is the argument about democracy. I will not expand on this because no one could improve on the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Norton, on Thursday. He simply made the point, which I shall try to make in a sentence, that our democratic system depends on the people electing the Commons, the Commons determining the Government and the people being able to throw out the Government in a general election. To have a directly elected second Chamber would be an immediate and obvious threat to that core of the democratic legitimacy of our constitution. Therefore, I say quite confidently that a directly elected second Chamber would not enhance our democracy; it would damage it.

I put this as the final paradox. I was pleased when I realised that this was the case. The strongest—although not to me—and most frequently repeated argument that one hears from supporters of an elected House—

[Lord Thomas of Gresford]

The noble Lord referred to his party’s manifestos. In 1912, Keir Hardie and Arthur Henderson campaigned on the basis of the abolition of the House of Lords. The current policy, as enunciated by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, is for 100% election. Just to clarify this, is the noble Lord saying that 1999 brought about the final apotheosis of the House of Lords and that it should remain in that form for ever?

[Lord Grocott]

The noble Lord tempts me down the line of being even more of a constitutional anorak than I am. I could read out for him, but I will not, the commitments of the Labour Party on Lords reform to sundry general elections over the years. There is no common pattern within it, except that quite frequently there is reference to controlling the powers of the second Chamber, but when it comes to composition, there has been absolutely no consistency. I am quite happy to put a copy of this deeply researched note in the Library should anyone wish to read it.

I come to what I think is the final paradox of where we are in Lords reform. It is interesting that I should have had an intervention from a Liberal Democrat because I have heard it said frequently that, somehow or other, an Act now on Lords reform would be the conclusion of a 100-years struggle—we have heard that previously, although I do not know who has been struggling but most of my constituents were not—started by that great Liberal Government of Asquith and Lloyd George, and that this is somehow a conclusion.

I ask the House to consider the following proposition. Were Lloyd George around today and sitting at the other end of the Chamber—we will call him Dave in order to keep it contemporary—his colleague alongside him might say, “Dave, have you seen this new Lords reform Bill?”. Lloyd George might say, “No, I haven’t seen it. What’s in it?”, and his colleague might say, “It’s a great Bill which makes the Lords more powerful and will enable them to throw out more Commons legislation. What is more, in due course it will be able to start blocking Budgets. What do you think of that?”. I do not think that David Lloyd George would be too struck with that proposition.

I say to the House that in terms of this simple proposition, which I hope does not sound too egotistical on the part of those of us who take this view, if any heirs to Lloyd George are sitting around in Parliament at the moment, they would be saying, “We are protecting the primacy of the House of Commons”. I am confident that that is what Lloyd George would want to see, were he here. It is certainly what I say and what most of my colleagues have been saying. I hope that the Government will listen to this and realise that it is not just a bad Bill, it is increasingly a friendless Bill. They would do themselves and the country a favour if they were simply to drop it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Cormack]

I am most grateful. A couple of weeks ago, the noble Lord, Lord Morgan, asked his noble friend Lord Thomas of Gresford why Lloyd George—the hero of the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown—did not believe in an elected second Chamber. The noble Lord, Lord Thomas, could not answer that question. Can the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, do so?

[Lord Thomas of Gresford]

I did answer that question. I said that Lloyd George was for the abolition of the House of Lords. “I am a single Chamber man”, he said—and in that he was assisted by Arthur Henderson and Keir Hardie.

[Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon]

I am grateful to my noble friend, but I do not want to talk about 1911—I want to talk about today. Democracy is on the march across the world, and you cannot keep it outside that door. In the end, you will be dragged there. Let me make this proposition to noble Lords: the longer they delay it, the more ridiculous they will look. That is where we are in the eyes of many of the public, 69% of whom want to see a directly elected Chamber. [Interruption.] I am grateful for any support I can get.

I want to answer a few of the arguments that have so far been put forward to prevent this happening, to delay it, and to make sure that we hang on to our seductive comforts for as long as we may. The first is the most ridiculous, but it featured in our previous debates and there were echoes of it on Thursday—that we are not a House of Parliament but a committee. Some committee! We are told that we are a monocameral Parliament, that all we do is advise and that this is just a committee. We are invited to believe, therefore, that when we met King John on the banks of the Thames nearly 1,000 years ago we were not beginning with a Magna Carta and Parliament but creating a committee—and that when we invite Her Majesty to come here all dressed up in her finery, accompanied by a company of the guards and a clatter of the Household Cavalry, to sit on the Throne and read the parliamentary programme for the future to your Lordships, who are dressed in red dressing gowns while the other Chamber has to come and parade before us, we are no more than a committee. That is a preposterous suggestion, and those who make it, as the noble Lord, Lord Richard, said in a previous debate, simply do not understand our history or function.

The argument that is made to bolster this claim is that we do not contribute to the making of laws. You cannot make that argument on the one hand and then claim, as my noble friend Lord Phillips did, that we have done our function because we have changed and passed so many laws. The truth of the matter is that we contribute to the making of the laws in this country. In a democracy, those who do the people’s business should be the people’s representatives. We are the daily affront to that basic principle. How can we be satisfied with that? It is a desperate and ludicrous argument that gives little comfort or respect to those who continue to seek to make it.

Big Society

Lord Thomas of Gresford Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Thomas of Gresford]

My Lords, when I was a very new, young and arrogant solicitor, I frequently appeared in the magistrates' court in the village of Ruabon in north-east Wales, an industrial part of Wales where coal was mined, steel was made, beer was brewed and chemicals were manufactured. I was always amused by the chairman of the local Bench, Lord Maelor, a former Member of this House, formerly Thomas Jones, the Labour Member for Merioneth. He lived all his life in nearby Ponciau, having worked down the pit as a young man. He later served as a non-combatant in the First World War. Indeed, he was imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs for refusing to obey an order on the grounds of conscience. In court, he always went out of his way to identify the defendant who was before him: “Was his uncle a member of Capel Mawr?”, “Did he live on Gutter Hill or was it Y Ffennant?” and so on.

Lord Maelor taught me two lessons. The first was that order is preserved in a community not by the police, but by the people: the elders, the relations and the parents. By far the worst area for vandalism and crime in the area was the brand new housing estate, Plas Madoc. It was so new that only young married people or partners lived there. Though they had moved in from the settled villages around, there were no rules, no frowns and no social disciplines in their community. The second lesson he taught me was that he would give youngsters a chance, but would follow through his sentences by his deep involvement in the community and by his continuity in office. He was the one you would come back before if you breached the probation order he was always ready to hand out.

I have been greatly helped in preparing for this debate by a study carried out by Dr Jane Donoghue of the Centre for Criminology at Oxford, which was published only last Saturday, 29 October, as Anti-Social Behaviour, Community Engagement and the Judicial Role in England and Wales. I commend the study to the Minister. She points out that a central principle of the concept of the big society is co-production: how communities and individuals connect and come together to design and produce solutions to shared problems.

In the context of the magistrates’ court, the informal mechanisms of the past—that individual relationship between the magistrates and the community they serve—are of limited value in today’s world. It appears that training designed by Her Majesty’s Courts Service and the Judicial Studies Board in 2008 to support magistrates in community engagement has not been systematically implemented. Dr Donoghue’s research shows that for the most part magistrates’ involvement does not go beyond attending occasional meetings with their local ASB unit. The reverse side of that coin is that community groups have very little engagement with the courts. They live in two separate worlds.

Participants from all the 17 ASB units studied expressed their disappointment and concern that magistrates so rarely engaged with the local community, and argued that a culture change was necessary, where magistrates would be required to allocate time to listen to the concerns of the local community. Some said that the courts do not think about the impact of an ASB on a community, that they do not understand the effect of ASBs on certain areas and that the community has no confidence in magistrates or the courts.

On the other side, it seems that some magistrates worry about judicial independence. Dr Donoghue found that in one area magistrates discontinued an existing practice of making visits because they were concerned not to be seen to be influenced by local residents. In only one of the 17 areas studied was it felt that magistrates had a high level of engagement with the local community and were willing to talk to residents, attend local meetings and become involved in the life of the community.

The other problem identified by Dr Donoghue’s research was a lack of supervision. Ten of the areas studied had no experience of any kind of the supervision of court orders by magistrates or district judges. This was because there was a significant lack of continuity between repeat offenders and sentencers. It is highly unlikely that an offender in breach of an order will be seen more than once by the same magistrate or district judge. There is no formal system in place to ensure that an offender appears before the same sentencer in every court hearing related to their case.

Dr Donoghue’s conclusion is that most courts have not yet embedded into their structure the principles of community justice. Magistrates still see their role as adjudicators of fact and meters out of punishment and no more. If the concept of the big society is to have flesh put upon its skeleton, community engagement and problem solving in partnership with community groups and agencies should become a formal, standardised part of a magistrate’s training and part of continuing professional development for existing district judges and magistrates.

Nobody could ever question the commitment of Lord Maelor to his community, and the result was this: clear confidence and trust in the Ruabon magistrates’ court by the whole community. He did not sit above the throng; he was a part of it, and it was a pleasure to appear before him, as I have no doubt the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, would confirm if he were here.