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Racial and Religious Hatred Bill

No. I am going to make some progress and then give way, as I said. The European convention on human rights makes it clear that the exercise of freedoms and the right to freedom of expression are protected. When the Joint Committee on Human Rights met to consider that and reported on 1 March 2005 on incitement to religious hatred, it accepted the existence of a serious, albeit limited, problem of incitement to hatred on religious grounds. It added:"““We consider the measures proposed in the . . . Bill are unlikely to give rise to any violation of the right to freedom of expression under Article 10 of ECHR””." The considerations of that Joint Committee ought to be an important point of reference for this debate, and I hope that they will be.