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Human Rights Judgments: Joint Committee on Human Rights Report

I welcome very warmly the action of my noble friend Lord Lester of Herne Hill in bringing this report before the Grand Committee. Many lawyers like myself and indeed those working beyond the legal world believe that my noble friend is the leading expert on human rights in this country, and has been so for many years. I should say that in so far as the Moses Room has such a thing as a Front Bench, owing to the unavailability of my noble friends who are appropriate speakers in such debates, I have lent myself to do so, but it is merely a temporary aberration. The Government are required by the European Convention on Human Rights to comply with the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights. This country played a central part in drafting the convention in 1950 and 1951, and we rightly pride ourselves on our legal system and observance of the rule of law. I believe it follows that we must set an example to other member states of the Council of Europe, some of which have lower standards of observance of the rule of law and obedience to the decisions of the courts than we do. We must help to bring those states up to our standards, not lower our standards to theirs. That is why compliance with the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights, and indeed with the final decisions of domestic courts if the case does not go to Strasbourg, is absolutely necessary. Under the Human Rights Act, the judiciary has power to declare primary legislation incompatible with the Act, but that does not invalidate that legislation. The duty of compliance therefore falls on the Government. This report plays an important part in ensuring that the Government do in fact comply with their duties. This year the report contains some good news and perhaps rather more in the way of bad news. One item I would include in the good news for the past year is that no final decisions declaring that any UK legislation is incompatible with the convention have been reached in the courts. That probably shows that over recent years, those responsible for the drafting of primary legislation have a better understanding of convention rights and that the main conflicts created by older legislation have worked themselves through the process. The bad news, as has already been pointed out, is the delay on the part of the Government in dealing with the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights made in earlier years. A particularly bad example of that arises from the decision in the Hirst case about the rights of prisoners to vote at elections and, like all other noble Lords who have spoken in the debate, I want to raise this point. The Hirst case was decided more than three years ago. Since then, the Government have taken no effective action to implement it. Although the report does not say it in so many words, the inference I draw from reading it is that the Government may well be correct in their belief that the necessary legislation would be unpopular and want to avoid taking any action before the next general election. The opposition to giving at least some prisoners the right to vote, however, ignores the principle expressed by the great prison reformer, Sir Alec Paterson, which is that criminals should be sent to prison as a punishment and not for punishment: the punishment is the loss of liberty, and thus prisoners should be treated humanely and not be deprived of any rights unless those rights are incompatible with their imprisonment. There is nothing inherently incompatible with imprisonment in allowing prisoners to have a postal ballot. Hirst recognises that prisoners can be denied the vote where the crime for which they have been sentenced is one that seeks to undermine democracy, the rule of law or human rights. I would go a little further than the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, in indicating some of the crimes that might justify deprivation of the right to vote. They include terrorism, involvement in organised crime, racist violence, electoral fraud and corruption involving holders of public office. However, the difficulty in deciding what crimes should remove the right to vote is no justification for the length of the delay in the Hirst case or the other cases referred to in this report. Before I sit down, I shall add a short coda on an entirely different subject. I was delighted to find in paragraph 121 that the Carson case is to go to Strasbourg. That problem has concerned me ever since I was my party’s spokesman in the House of Lords on pensions. Mrs Carson is one of approximately 500,000 people entitled to a United Kingdom state pension because of the contributions they made when resident and working in this country who are now resident abroad. People in this category do not receive the annual inflation pension increase given to all pensioners resident in the United Kingdom, the European Union and some other countries. This means that the pensions of Mrs Carson and the hundreds of thousands of other people in that position diminish in real terms every year. That is weird, unjustifiable and unfair discrimination, which was introduced by the Wilson Government in the 1960s. It has never been revoked, no doubt because most of the pensioners affected by this rule have no vote. Mrs Carson failed in the courts of this country, including in the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords, but I hope that the European Court of Human Rights will give a good bashing to whichever Government are in power when the case comes before it. I hope that whichever Government are in power will move as quickly as possible to apply the inflation update to all pensioners. That is enough from me this afternoon.