Armed Forces (Prevention of Discrimination) Bill

Debate between Rory Stewart and Bob Stewart

Friday 24th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Rory Stewart]

With respect to the hon. Gentleman, that is not exactly the point I am making. I do not deny that members of the armed forces can be treated unfairly, nor do I deny that because they are going somewhere in uniform they are likely to be identified as a special category and treated unfairly as such. My argument is based not on the notion that there are no examples of unfair treatment but on the general assumption that expanding discrimination legislation is a very dangerous thing for this House to do. It is not simply that as a Conservative I feel that we already produce too much legislation and that we feel the effects of excessive legislation, but that extending discrimination legislation, in particular, should be done only in the most extreme situations.

[Bob Stewart]

On that point, and in support of the hon. Member for Dunfermline and West Fife (Thomas Docherty), did the landlord in this particular case act illegally by discriminating against a group of people who went in to his pub to have a drink? Did he break the law by saying no?

[Rory Stewart]

A whole body of case law exists exactly to resolve such issues of discrimination of any sort that we have not to date felt a need to resolve. Discrimination can already happen in the United Kingdom against people who are not in protected categories. It is possible, for example, to take legal redress as a white male former member of the armed forces. My hon. Friend himself would be able to seek legal redress in many situations in which he felt that he had been unfairly treated. The particular question of the rights of publicans to admit or not admit people into their establishments is another area of case law.

This is a question for the Edinburgh courts; it is not for me to determine what the publican did. My sense, as regards the publican’s right to do what he did, is that in this case the publican’s argument was not the argument that the hon. Member for Dunfermline and West Fife has suggested; the publican’s argument was not that he believed that the people in uniform were going to cause trouble, but that he had had a lot of experience of the other people in the pub causing trouble and attacking people in uniform when they came in. In other words, he believed that it was an exacerbating factor and he was in no way criticising the people in uniform. He was trying to protect against violence breaking out in his pub on the basis of experience of that happening in the past. Unless the hon. Gentleman has a deep understanding of exactly how much violence has happened in that pub and why the publican, who would have an interest in trying to generate income from alcohol sales, excluded those people, it would be difficult to judge in this case.

Human Rights Act 1998 (Repeal and Substitution) Bill

Debate between Rory Stewart and Bob Stewart

Friday 1st March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Rory Stewart]

That is a telling intervention. The answer is that we have signed and ought to respect and uphold the United Nations universal declaration of human rights. It exists; we are signatories to it.

[Bob Stewart]

We have signed up to it.

[Rory Stewart]

Yes. As my hon. Friend points out, we are signatories to that declaration of human rights. We were the first signatories to it in 1948 and it is the precursor to the European convention. We have signed it and we should respect it. Should we establish a court to uphold the information in the UN universal declaration of human rights? I think we should be very cautious of doing that. The UN declaration includes many elements that would be difficult for a court to rule on and that would be difficult to apply to the 200 members of the United Nations. For example, the declaration includes a right to paid holiday. That is difficult to imagine in Chad, Mali or the Congo. It is difficult to imagine what would be involved if somebody in a developing country who lives on a dollar a day asserted their right to a paid holiday, and it is therefore difficult to imagine an international court that would rule on that kind of information.

Nevertheless, in certain circumstances we should respect the UN declaration and international courts. A classic example is the International Criminal Court or the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Britain is a signatory to all cases with the ICTY and the ICC and upholds the rulings of those courts that deal with crimes against humanity. To return to the beginning of the argument, we sign up to such bodies because we accept that crimes against humanity can be committed anywhere by anyone in any circumstance, and the sovereignty of an individual Parliament or country does not trump an individual’s rights to be exempt. Not even the sovereignty of this Parliament. Not even this Parliament ought to be allowed to commit crimes against humanity—to put the most extreme situation. We sign these things at international level, and we constrain the power of our Parliament, as we should, in those specific cases.

In other cases, the moral, legal and philosophical arguments are better conducted in the domestic context.

[Bob Stewart]

Is it not the case that the International Criminal Court and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia try crimes against humanity and crimes of genocide only if there is no way that a national jurisdiction will deal with the problem? Only then does it go to the ICC or the ICTY.

[Rory Stewart]

That is a fundamental principle, and my hon. Friend is correct to raise it. In the international system, we have an important conception of state sovereignty. The only argument being made today is that state sovereignty is not absolute; it does not trump everything else, but to return to the language that my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset does not like, up to a certain threshold, state sovereignty obtains. Up to a certain point, there must be the opportunity to attempt to resolve the situation domestically, but at that point, when the state concerned has failed to deal with crimes against humanity, it is not only legal under the international system but morally correct for an international court to overrule the national Government.