European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Lords, 2018-04-23
Topic: Civil Rights
Margot Aline (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I support the amendment and would like to return to three points that I raised in Committee that Ministers have not adequately addressed First, I have asked four times how the fundamental requirement in the Good Friday agreement for an equivalent level of human rights protection in Northern Ireland and the Republic will be maintained if citizens of Northern Ireland can no longer look to the charter. The only substantive response that I have received so far was the irrelevant and erroneous point that, because the Good Friday agreement preceded the charter, it will not be affected by it. That is entirely to miss the point, because as I and other noble Lords, including my noble friend Lady Smith of Basildon, have said time and again the point is about equivalence. For the fifth time now, how will the foundational Good Friday agreement principle of equivalence of human rights protection be maintained in the absence of the charter? I can only conclude that I still have not received a convincing answer because there is no convincing answer. Secondly, I asked the Minister in Committee whether he rejected the analysis of the Joint Committee on Human Rights of the Government’s right by right analysis, which identified a number of rights that will be lost in the absence of the charter. I draw attention in particular to children’s rights, to which we will be returning later at Report. It is a particularly important matter. The JCHR analysis said: "Article 24 of the charter sets out the rights of the child. The Government states that the source of this right is the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. This is not incorporated into domestic law and therefore does not confer enforceable rights upon individuals" The Minister’s response was: "We have considered that analysis, and that is why I indicated that we were still looking at this. As I said, if rights are identified which are not in fact going to be incorporated into our domestic law in the absence of the charter, we will look very carefully at ensuring that those are not lost".—[Official Report, 26/2/18; col. 570.] The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, has already referred to the fact that certain rights will be lost. What has happened to this careful look again? I have not seen the government amendment which will ensure that we keep these rights. Not only the Joint Committee on Human Rights but the Equality and Human Rights Commission, as the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, said, the Bingham Centre and many others have identified a series of rights that will be lost. Does the Minister reject the Joint Committee on Human Rights’ analysis, the legal opinion given to the Equality and Human Rights Commission and everything that the highly respected Bingham Centre has said on this? What are the Government going to do about the rights that we will no longer have if we lose the charter Thirdly, in response to a claim by the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, that the Government have made clear that they have no intention of repealing the Human Rights Act, I quoted the last Conservative manifesto—bedtime reading for me, of course—which stated: "we will consider our human rights legal framework when the process of leaving the EU concludes" I asked the Minister for an assurance about the Conservative Party’s long-term commitment to the Human Rights Act, but answer came there none. If the Government are planning to consider the human rights legal framework post Brexit, surely that is the time to look at the charter so that Parliament—I take the point made by my noble friend Lord Howarth, although he is perhaps not quite such a friend at this moment—can look at the whole human rights landscape holistically. That is when we should consider what happens to the future of the charter.