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Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

I was about to come on to that. This is the third intervention in which the hon. Gentleman has made that point; I heard him the first time and was ready to deal with it the first time. Let me commend to him the report of the Joint Committee on Human Rights. In an all-party report, and a significant number of Conservatives were members of the Committee, whose conclusions were made very clear:"““In our view, for the reasons we have summarised above, the continued existence of the offences can no longer be justified, and we are confident that this would also, in today's conditions, be the view of the English courts under the Human Rights Act and””," indeed, nowadays,"““the Strasbourg Court under the ECHR””." What the Wingrove case established was that the Strasbourg Court established a wide margin of appreciation for individual states in those days, but we can be confident that the Human Rights Act 1998 is such that the UK courts applying the European convention in this country would be very clear that this was unjustified discrimination. That is not just my view, but that of the legal advisers to the Joint Committee on Human Rights and many other authorities. In any event, even if there is doubt over whether the measure is either discriminatory or an unreasonable, unnecessary and unjustified chilling of free expression, we should be certain that we do not have that chilling effect, and that we do not suppress free expression.