---

Human Rights

My Lords, the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, asked, ““Are there any more Marias?”” I am afraid the answer is ““lots””. We heard about them in the Joint Select Committee on Human Rights. We even heard of one poor woman who had AIDS and was refused treatment on the National Health Service. She had no money and could not afford to have it done privately. That is something of which this country should be deeply ashamed. The noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, had a lovely sort of love fest for the Human Rights Act. She said that the Prime Minister’s record was frightfully good on it. I suggest that his record on it is absolutely appalling. He has introduced 3,000 new crimes and has said that ancient liberties are an old-fashioned virtue. Let us remember that the Human Rights Act, as the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, said, was written by the noble Lord, Lord Renton, and Lord Kilmuir. I cannot mention Lord Kilmuir without remembering that little ditty: "““There’s nothing worse than death in life Than David Patrick Maxwell Fyfe And now at last he’s found the cure And blossomed forth as Lord Kilmuir””." The Lord Chancellor lectures us on the glories of Magna Carta, ancient liberties and the rule of law. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, sometimes reminds me of the French Army. France was the aggressor in Europe for about 300 years, but it managed to get away with it because it had an enormous amount of charm and panache—and it produced very good food. When the poor old Germans start behaving like that, they have neither of those so they get very strongly disapproved of. The noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor has presided, almost with the panache of a French general, over an assault on our human rights and ancient liberties. I will list them because it is a list of which we should be deeply ashamed. I quickly note to my noble friend Lord Patten, who is not in his place, that the reason for keeping the Crown in the hands of the Church of England is that the Crown is supreme governor of the Church of England, and there is no hurry to repeal this legislation, if it needs to be repealed. In the Great Papal Bull of Regnans in Excelsis, Pope Pius V said that Queen Elizabeth could reasonably be assassinated by her Roman Catholic subjects because they could not show twin loyalty to the Roman Catholic Church and their lawful sovereign. The noble Lord, Lord St John of Fawsley, told me—and we all know that he is an essentially genius-like authority on these matters—that that Papal Bull was eventually repealed, but in the reign of our present Sovereign in 1958. I should like to list some of the things that the Government have done which I regard as assaults on British liberties. Earlier this week we debated the Fraud (Trials without a Jury) Bill. The Government had earlier been persuaded by pressure from this House that such a provision could be brought in only by affirmative order. Knowing full well that they could not get it through by the affirmative procedure, they decided to produce a Bill on which they thought they might be able to invoke the Parliament Act. That is cheating, frankly. It is going back on what they said and, as was pointed out in the debate, those liberties are essential and should be guarded. In no particular order, we have had the retaining of fingerprints from innocent people and the taking of DNA samples from children. It has been reported that up to a quarter of Afro-Caribbean males have had their DNA samples kept. The noble Baroness, Lady Verma, adduced that; and rightly so. It is a disgrace. You can now be sent to prison—admittedly, indirectly—on the basis of hearsay evidence. ASBOs can be given on hearsay evidence. We know how unreliable that can be. If you breach an ASBO, that is contempt of court and inside you go. Consequently, you can go inside for hearsay evidence. That is against all natural justice. Under control orders, of which we have been hearing in the JCHR, you do not hear the evidence against you. If your advocate hears what is called closed evidence, he is not allowed to pass it on to you, so you have no idea what are the charges against you. We still refuse to use intercept evidence. Terrorism is criminal. Do not give it the flattery of calling it a war. We are dealing with criminals—of, I quite accept, a very nasty character. We must deal with them in the criminal way according to law and according to criminal evidence. The Government want to lock up people for 90 days without trial. Thanks to parliamentary action, the limit has been held at 28 days. Some of us would say that that is too long. During the whole of the IRA troubles, people could be held for only 96 hours without charge. We managed, more or less, to contain that. Through hints, we know that the Government are trying to increase that to 90 days. We have the Regulatory Reform Act, which includes powers for Ministers, admittedly, under restrained circumstances, to change Acts of Parliament. We have the Civil Contingencies Act, which again can repeal Acts of Parliament. Parts of the Animal Health Act allow Ministers much greater power than they should have. There are the provisions for the prevention of serious crime and disorder. If someone thinks that someone is a crook, and a big enough crook at that, he can be put under house arrest, have his bank accounts frozen and be banned from using the internet or the telephone. As the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart said, these people have their rights. I am not saying that they should be allowed to be drug dealers, major fraudsters or bank robbers. Of course I am not. I am saying that it is a very old established thing that you are innocent until proven guilty and you cannot just be locked up on suspicion. I believe that there were 439,000 applications to monitor telephone calls last year. About 500,000 people have been stopped and searched under terrorism laws, including yours truly, who was driving down the Embankment and was stopped by two policemen and three special constables. When I said that I had had my car searched in the House of Lords car park and showed them my identity card, they redoubled their endeavours to search my car. I did not object to that, but, on principle, it is wrong. I accept that in my personal circumstance it may be perfectly justified. Under terrorism laws, people have been arrested for having something rude about the Prime Minister on a T-shirt at an agricultural show. People have been arrested and charged under the Crime and Disorder Act for reading out the names of war dead in front of the Cenotaph. An elderly German was arrested for heckling Jack Straw at a political meeting. What the heavens are political meetings for if you cannot heckle people? Finally, irony of ironies, someone was arrested for quoting George Orwell outside No. 10 Downing Street. Civil bailiffs have for the first time since 1604 been given the power to force their way into private houses. That is not the record of a Government interested in civil liberties; it is the record of a Government who have taken them away and abused them. The sooner that they are out of office and those liberties can be restored to the British people, the better.