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Human Rights

I am grateful to be called, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I indicated to Mr. Speaker that I hoped that I might be, as I was prevented from being here at the beginning because of a long-standing engagement. I apologise to the Minister and to her opposite number on the Conservative Front Bench that I did not hear their contributions, but obviously I will read them tomorrow. I hope that I will not say anything that is in ignorance of what they said, or in any way disrespectful of things that they may have brought to the House. Unlike the hon. Member for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis), I do not come here as a philosopher or even as a former philosophy student, but as a former human rights lawyer and as one who is absolutely, strongly and unreservedly in favour of the legislation and supportive of the progressive development that the Government brought about when they introduced the Human Rights Act, as the best way that they could see of incorporating the convention into domestic law. I was indeed a practitioner as a lawyer before. My interest––not formally relevant but so people know––is that, after my call to the Bar, I spent a couple of years as a trainee and then as an employee on human rights matters in the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. That was in the 1970s. Twenty years before, we ratified the convention. At the time, as hon. Members have mentioned, people were beginning to bring cases of individual petition. The ratification after the war, the right of individual petition and lastly the incorporation into domestic law have all been very good developments. Colleagues have referred to the context. This is one of the legacies of the decision after the war of the great leaders of Europe—Winston Churchill was one and there were equivalent leaders in France, Italy, Germany and elsewhere—to ensure that we never had war again in this continent and that we set a good example. The Council of Europe was one other legacy, as was the transformation of the League of Nations into the United Nations and the convention on human rights. We should be proud of that and proud of the part that the British played in the writing of the document which gave us the human rights that we have written down today. This has been a developing document. Documents have been much laboured over—for example in the United Nations, as referred to by the hon. Member for Stone (Mr. Cash), where the universal declaration eventually became the UN international covenant on civil and political rights. There is also the European document. Those documents were not frozen in time. They were agreed at the beginning, but, as hon. Members know, they were then added to by negotiated protocols that supplemented the original document. The hon. Member for New Forest, East implied that there was far too much legislation. By my calculation, there are only 15 rights in total; they are set out in the convention and all its protocols. Fifteen rights is not far too many; a very limited number of rights are protected. All are rights that most British people would regard as fundamental rights that they would want to be defended. There is the right to life, the prohibition of torture, and the prohibition of slavery, referred to by the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous); we got rid of that 200 years ago, and it is protected in the convention that we should not have slavery and forced labour again. There is also the right to liberty and security, the right to a fair trial, the right to freedom of expression, the right to education, the right to family life, and the right not to be discriminated against. Those rights are not alien to us; they are fundamentally central to the citizenry of this country—and the fact that they are written down gives us a much better guarantee that they will be upheld than ever we had before, for reasons I shall come on to discuss.