Council of Europe and the European Convention on Human Rights

Debate between Stella Creasy and Sarah Russell

Wednesday 5th November 2025 Westminster Hall

[Ms Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge (Cat Eccles) for securing this important debate.

George Orwell said:

“There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”

I am not mad when I say that the debate on leaving the ECHR is nothing to do with immigration; I am telling the truth, which is something I hope the hon. Member for Great Yarmouth (Rupert Lowe) will finally come to realise. The convention is not designed to interfere with immigration policy; it says nothing about immigration, and the Court has long acknowledged the right of states to control their borders. That is why Oxford University data shows that only 3.5% of deportations of foreign criminals were successfully appealed on human rights grounds. That is the truth.

The fundamental purpose of the ECHR is to protect people from Governments of all colours. It stopped the Georgian Government arbitrarily detaining people. The Polish state has had to compensate thousands of citizens who had property taken away. Children in the Czech Republic were given rights to school. The failures of the French Government to tackle modern slavery were addressed. That is why apologists for authoritarian Governments such as the Russians hate it, and why they use immigration as a cover for their attacks. Now people want us to make the same mistake again—of walking away, not being in the room and isolating ourselves, as we did in Europe through Brexit—by walking away from the protection the ECHR offers our citizens: the protection that helped the Hillsborough families get justice, the protection that helped the victims of the black-cab rapist John Worboys, the protection that secured human rights and abortion access in Northern Ireland.

Even if people do not care about victims of crime or of miscarriages of justice, or about those who have been forced out of our armed forces for being gay, they might care about taxes. In February this year, the Court forced the Italians to stop a series of tax raids on companies because it was against their human rights. All of that—those basic rights—are at stake. And that is before we even get to the fact that it is the foundation of our trade agreements, and why other countries want to do business with us, that we follow the rule of law and hold ourselves accountable to a shared standard. That is why the ECHR is the foundation of the Good Friday agreement and is written into the EU trade and co-operation agreement, especially the deals on crime and policing.

[Sarah Russell (Congleton) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Ms Creasy]

My apologies, but I will not.

The Court also recognises the jurisdiction of nations. I reassure my hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield (Steve Yemm) that if he has problems with how the ECHR is interpreted, we can pass domestic laws to address that. I know that some in this room want the Court to be a bogeyman, but the truth is that it actually respects our rights, including democracy. That is why we were able to vote on the issue of prisoner voting.

What is not true is that any Government writing their own Bill of Rights would offer the same protection to our constituents. Any fool can see that a Government who set out what rights we have one day can take them away the next. A Bill of Rights without someone external to ensure that it is enforced is not worth the paper it is written on. That is why the international rule of law matters. Leaving the ECHR would give a future Government the power to weaken the rights of our constituents. It would bring us back to the chaos of Brexit. It would be an attack on our freedoms, not an advance of them. The truth may hurt, but it also sets you free.

Paternity Leave and Pay

Debate between Stella Creasy and Sarah Russell

Wednesday 23rd October 2024 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Sarah Russell (Congleton) (Lab)]

I have spent the last 13 years advising women, in particular, in employment tribunals, and I have advised a lot of women who have suffered maternity discrimination. That was an absolute mainstay of my practice. My comments will be completely heteronormative; that is not to disparage any other family structures.

During the pandemic, for the first time large numbers of women and men were able to work from home. I say that because prior to the pandemic I spent a lot of time advising women on flexible working requests. If they asked to work from home for one or perhaps two days a week, that was habitually turned down. They were told that it was completely impossible; employers would not hear of it. Once men did it, it became absolutely acceptable, and it is now absolutely fine in most organisations for parents of either gender to work from home for one or two days a week.

If women continue to take the overwhelming majority of parental leave, they will continue to take the entire career burden and will be systematically discriminated against for it. This is a widespread issue: 54,000 women a year lose their jobs when they are pregnant or on maternity leave.

[Ms Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

We also have to think about all the women who do not have children but are discriminated against anyway because employers expect them to. Does my hon. Friend agree that to get paternity leave right, we have to ensure that everyone in their 30s and 40s is equally discriminated against because they might go off and have children?

[Mrs Russell]

I completely recognise what my hon. Friend says. The risk zone for women’s careers starts when they are approximately 25 and carries on until they are at least 45. I have been advised not to wear my wedding ring to interviews because I was likely to be viewed as a pregnancy risk. Until we deal with that—until men take significant amounts of leave and are paid properly to do it—we will continue to face this issue, and women will be systematically discriminated against, as she says, whether they have children or not.

Approximately 12% of employers disclosed in a YouGov poll that they were reluctant to hire a woman simply because she might become pregnant. This is a widespread issue, whether women have children or not. We need non-transferable, “use it or lose it” parental leave for the second parent and we must ensure that that is paid at a rate such that people are actually able to take the leave. Once we have that and it becomes the default minimum—some fathers will choose to take significantly longer—everyone will be a risk, and everyone will be able to have career development. That will change the entire attitude towards maternity leave in our society. As I said, 54,000 women a year lose their jobs when pregnant or on maternity leave. All the women I advised thought they were just individually unlucky but given the volume of them I can say that they were not unlucky—it was systematic.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Pritchard. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Telford (Shaun Davies) on securing this long-overdue debate. Previous debates have had a minimal turnout, so it is fantastic to see so many people here. I also pay tribute to the Dad Shift and the original campaigners Pregnant Then Screwed and Joeli Brearley.

Joeli Brearley came up with the pancake test: if we consistently put mums and dads in two different boxes, with mums looking after babies and dads having to go back to work after those first two weeks, when you have just realised that the meconium will eventually stop, it is mums who learn how to feed the child pancakes and dads who do not. It is mums who will get why some days the child wants pancakes rolled up, some days they want them flat and some days they want them with cream. That everyday caring for children is at the heart of being able to look after them, and slowly but surely it ends up being easier for the mum to take the child and to deal with the toddler, and dads get further and further away.

That is why, in the minute I have left, I want to argue in front of the Minister for PaPa—protected and paid leave—which we need for mums and dads in every single relationship. There is a risk that the Employment Rights Bill and the brilliant changes it introduces could entrench the challenges we are discussing, rather than helping us to resolve them. What do I mean by that? I mean that, if we entrench the idea that shared parental leave is the answer to the challenge, we are entrenching one of the biggest crimes against relationships. As the data shows us time and again, it is mums who end up having to look after children and mums who end up having to take that link. That is why in this country there is a motherhood penalty, which means that mums are seen as less committed, less capable, less competent and less worthy of promotion.

[Mrs Russell]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the idea that “part-timer” is a term of abuse is a shocking concept, and that what we are discussing today could help with that?

[Ms Creasy]

I completely agree. I was also shocked to hear Conservative Members, who obviously are not in this Chamber today, talking about flexible working as somehow lesser working. When people work flexibly, they do not work less—that is why they end up sending emails in the evening, because they are prioritising their time to do bedtime. They make it work for their family.

This debate is about making things work for families and tackling the inequalities in the workplace. Those inequalities are why we have a gender pay gap in this country—though in fact it is not a gender pay gap, but a motherhood pay gap. There is also a fatherhood premium, but we are showing in this debate that it is not a premium at all, because asking dads to work harder and longer and to be away from their children is not what modern dads want. That is why so many fathers look at flexibility in the workplace when they take on jobs, and that is why this debate matters.

If we want to support every family, it cannot just be the wealthiest who can set the terms on when they get to see their kids and make those pancakes. I therefore urge the Minister to consider an amendment that many of us will be tabling relating to PaPa for dads in their own right, because that will help every member of the family. I said it in the main Chamber, and I will say it again here: having PaPa is good for us, because our economic competitors are doing it, and we have some of the worst rates of paternity leave. It is also good because we can prevent another generation of dads reaching the stage of having teenagers who they have no relationship with, because they have not been there—not just to make pancakes, but to be the best dad they want to be.