Human Rights Act 1998 — House of Lords, 2022-07-14
Topic: Civil Rights
George Foulkes (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I too warmly congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, and the Labour Party on initiating what has been an excellent debate. I am not normally here at this time on a Thursday, as my noble colleagues know I have particular interest in this issue as a member of the United Kingdom delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. We oversee the operation of the European Convention on Human Rights and the court First, I remind the House that the Human Rights Act was passed by our Parliament, as the Labour Party said at the time, to bring rights home, enabling UK citizens to take alleged breaches of ECHR rights before UK courts, as the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, rightly said. That is being misrepresented by people opposite It now seems that the Government are intent on ripping up the HRA and introducing this new, weaker, so-called Bill of Rights in order, sinisterly, and among other things, to make it harder for asylum seekers to make Britain their home Despite the best efforts of the right-wing press to convince us otherwise, the court in Strasbourg and the convention were not designed by some European Union bureaucracy; they were designed by us, as others have so rightly said. In fact, the UK initiated the convention project out of a shared belief that human rights throughout Europe should be common to all. It is particularly vital, as many of us here know, for the countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union The court in Strasbourg is clearly still a place where the UK has influence, and all of us who are delegates to PACE elect the judges to the court after very careful scrutiny. I can tell noble Lords that it is a large bench of very distinguished judges. I have met our own British judge, who is a very distinguished member. They are all like that; we look at things very carefully Attempts to replace the Human Rights Act with a Bill which will limit our accountability to the ECHR, combined with recent suggestions that we should entirely remove ourselves from the court, from the convention and presumably from the Council of Europe, severely diminish our standing as a leader on human rights in Europe. I think it is Suella Braverman who has been promoting that. I think many of us will be glad to see that she is out of the race to be leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister We should be under no illusion as to the effect these proposed changes will have. Without the Human Rights Act and by extension the ECHR to protect basic human rights, the most marginalised groups in society will suffer. Article 8 protects the right to respect for family life and has been successfully used to prevent the deportation of migrants and refugees when it has been deemed that deportation would put their family members at risk. The new Bill proposes tightening the definition of risk to "extreme harm" and limiting its application to children, not all family members. Beyond the risks of regressive reinterpretations of the ECHR, the new Bill also seeks to introduce the concept of individual responsibility, which would seem directly to undermine the idea that all should be equally entitled to human rights. The Bill of Rights would also require individuals seeking to make a human rights claim against a public authority first to seek permission from a court, which would create yet another barrier for vulnerable people A number of Members mentioned the excellent memorandum from the Scottish Human Rights Commission. I say as a former Member of the Scottish Parliament that I agree with it and strongly support what it has said to us. In summary, it says that in its view, the UK Government’s proposals threaten to damage protections available under the Scotland Act, "unsettling the Scottish devolution and introducing confusion and uncertainty for Scotland’s public authorities." A number of Members have asked the Minister to deal with this in his reply. I reinforce that and ask him to do so clearly and explicitly If the Human Rights Act needs reform, it certainly should not be driven by populist policies targeting people who have in many cases already suffered human rights abuses. The Government should instead consider much-needed reform of our criminal justice system, which is a much more pressing priority, given that current failures in the court and prison systems are encouraging rather than preventing crime, as we see in Scotland as well as in England and Wales If the United Kingdom is to remain at the forefront, as we should be, of the defence of human rights around the world, the Government need to make a rapid U-turn as quickly as possible, and I hope this is done under whoever is the new leader of that party opposite.