Oral Answers to Questions

William Bain Excerpts

Tuesday 20th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr William Bain (Glasgow North East) (Lab)]

4. What assessment he has made of the effectiveness of the Human Rights Act 1998.

[The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Kenneth Clarke)]

In the coalition agreement, the Government committed to establishing a commission to investigate the creation of a Bill of Rights. The scope of the commission and its terms of reference will be announced in due course, but it is my expectation that in the course of its work the commission will consider the experience of the Human Rights Act 1998.

[Mr Bain]

I am grateful to the Lord Chancellor for that response. Does he agree that, on the 10th anniversary of the implementation of the Act, domestically enforceable and universally applicable human rights are one of the best checks on Executive power that we have, and does he agree with the remarks that he made in The Daily Telegraph on 27 June 2006 that to repeal the Human Rights Act would be an act of “xenophobic and legal nonsense”?

[Mr Clarke]

We are going to review in due course every aspect of the working of the Human Rights Act in the light of that 10 years of experience. I agree that there are very important protections for human rights, and there is no question of moving away from the European convention on human rights. The coalition agreement does not contemplate that. Actually, the changes that have taken place in British common law, with the huge enlargement of the scope of judicial review—which includes reviews of all ministerial decisions and of legislation current in the House—have also greatly altered the scene. Sometimes that gets confused with the European convention on human rights. I have given a range of views in the past and no doubt we will consider those views carefully in the light of the report that we eventually get from the commission.