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Human Rights

I think that it is important that we legislate in the House to ensure the rights of the citizen. I do not see any contradiction between that and the provisions of the convention on human rights. On the specific point that the hon. Gentleman raises about control orders, had the Government taken our advice on the matter of control orders, they would not have found themselves in legal difficulties in implementing them, but they chose not to do so. They chose not to put in the safeguards that we demanded. The inevitable result was that the Human Rights Act did its job in requiring the Government to think again. That is a good illustration of the Act doing its job effectively. The hon. Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) made the point well that the last element that has helped to whip up that campaign has been senior Ministers in the Government—not the Lord Chancellor, not the Attorney-General, not the hon. and learned Lady, but a succession of Home Secretaries and the Prime Minister, who have lost no opportunity to rubbish the effects of their own legislation and to rubbish the decisions of judges made on the basis of that legislation. When shown to be wrong, as they have been, they have not made any effort to retract their statements. That is deplorable. Why do we have that campaign against the Human Rights Act? One reason is the allergy to the word ““European””. The fact that the name of the convention is the European convention on human rights leads some who are ill informed to assume that it is the spawn of the European devil: the European Union. It is not of course, as has been made clear in the debate. If anything, it was the creation of the British Government and the British judiciary after the war, very much supported by Sir Winston Churchill at the time, although perhaps not by Attlee. Of course, the spirit of Churchill is now dormant within the Conservative party. That is one element in the concern about the current Conservative attitude. There is confusion as to what the Act says. Very few people understand that it creates no new rights and that all it does is change the area of justiciability of those rights to a British court. That is something that British people should be very pleased about. They will save money, and find it easier to put their case to a British court than to go to a court in Strasbourg. Incidentally, a court in Strasbourg may have much less well defined sensibilities about British culture and British justice than a court here, yet there is a misunderstanding about that. Concern was expressed immediately after the passing of the Act that, because of the publicity attendant on its passing, there would be a huge appetite for litigation. I am sure that all hon. Members will have heard people in their surgeries who, when dismayed about some petty decision by a bureaucracy in their constituencies, say, ““I know my human rights. I am going to get this under the Human Rights Act.”” They are almost always wrong because there is no requirement under the Human Rights Act that the lamp post outside their window should be moved 3 ft down the road, that the pothole be filled or all the other things done that they tell us about. They tell us, however, that what they want is a human right, that it is justiciable and that they will get a remedy in court. The reality is that the number of cases being brought under the terms of the Act is reducing markedly; there has been a 27 per cent. fall from the peak according to the most recent records, and barristers estimate that in only 5 per cent. of all cases is there any Human Rights Act implication at all in the judge’s judgment. There are also failings of reporting—of the British media. Often a headline will be splashed across the front page about someone who is going to court because their human rights have been infringed in some way, but what is never reported is the fact that the case was laughed out of court and the person who brought it ended up out of pocket for putting forward such a prosperous proposition that his human rights had been in any way curtailed. There are also stories that are just plain wrong. We have already heard play from Members in all parts of the House about the incident on the roof in Gloucester—about the poor and much-quoted criminal on the roof. Let me say something drawn from my experience. I was for a while a chairman of a police authority and I was very much involved in policing policy in the Avon and Somerset area. I had experience of contingency planning for hostage situations. It is standard police practice, and always has been, to make sure that the material needs of an individual in a hostage situation, or in a situation where someone might throw themselves from the top of a building, are settled so that negotiations can be continued. That has nothing to do with human rights. As the Minister said, no article of the European convention on human rights mentions Kentucky fried chicken. That is simply not there, so why do we pretend that it is? In an intervention, the hon. Member for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis) raised an issue to do with an assault case. I am sorry to have to tell him that if someone is accused of assault, they are accused of it not under the provisions of the Human Rights Act. It might be the case that they are wrongly accused of assault—that they are preposterously accused of assault—but that would not be the fault of the Human Rights Act, so why pretend that it is?