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Criminal Law (Amendment) (Protection of Property) Bill

My hon. Friend is right. Some of the examples that were given earlier make that clear. Victims gave tough responses, even including the death of the assailant. In all the cases to which I referred the victim was either not prosecuted or was cleared. My hon. Friend the Member for Tooting has been waiting with bated breath for some time for my views on the Human Rights Act 1998. I will indulge him, although I had hoped to deal with the matter in a more structured way later in my speech. I speak in this context as the Chairman of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, although I was not the Chairman when the Committee produced its two reports on this subject. Our starting point when considering this serious matter must be part I of schedule 1 to the Human Rights Act. One of the rights and freedoms under the convention is article 2, which is titled ““Right to life””. There would be a possible cross-reference to article 8 and the UN convention on the rights of the child if the alleged criminal were a child. I will not go down the route of the UN convention because we have insufficient time, but that convention would cause the promoter of the Bill additional problems. If the Bill were a Government Bill, the Minister would have had to certify that it was human rights compliant. As it is a private Member’s Bill, however, it does not have to go through that process. I would be surprised if the hon. Member for Vale of York had made any effort to check the position of the Bill under the legislation. If the Bill were found not to be compliant with the Human Rights Act or the European convention on human rights, our courts could certify that the Bill was incompatible. If that happened, we would simply end up back here having the debate all over again. We would turn the law back to where we started because that would be required of us under the 1998 Act.