Racial and Religious Hatred Bill

My Lords, the noble Baroness said that it would stop discussion. That has been a theme running through a great many of the speeches today. Noble Lords have said that it would cause self-censorship and, on the other hand, that it will raise expectations; that it fails to identify conduct which might lead to prosecutions; that there is no distinction between beliefs and believers; that it will undermine relationships between faith groups; that it will jeopardise the book trade; and that all those objections to the Bill have not been discussed before. Yet as the second maiden speaker, the noble Baroness, Lady Corston, remarked, the proposals now before us have had an extremely long gestation—much longer than she commented on. A proposal to make incitement to religious hatred an offence was considered originally in the Public Order Bill in 1936 and again in the proceedings on the Race Relations Bill in 1965. It was discussed by the Law Commission in 1981 as part of its review of offences against religion and public worship, and again in a paper with the same title setting out its final views in 1985. Twenty years ago the Law Commission made a few points which are relevant today. It said that the concept of a ““racial group”” in Section 70 of the Public Order Act was closely linked to membership of a group which is distinguished by a common religion—a point that does not seem to have dawned on many noble Lords who have spoken today. The commission pointed out that some of the latter groups were protected already because they already had a common ““ethnic origin””. It said that if incitement to religious hatred should become a problem in the future—as it was not in 1986—it would be possible to amend the existing offence of incitement to racial hatred for that purpose. That is what we are now doing. Nobody has disputed the fact that incitement to religious hatred is now a serious issue that has to be tackled. The Government sought to do that in the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Bill in 2001. At that time, noble Lords argued that it was an inappropriate vehicle for that proposal as it had nothing to do with terrorism. It was dropped only to be reincarnated in the Religious Offences Bill in 2002. That Bill was referred by the House to a Select Committee on Religious Offences, which spent almost a year taking evidence from representatives of the Home Office, the Attorney-General, the DPP and all major religions, including secularists. I wonder how many noble Lords who have misunderstood the nature of these proposals bothered to read the report of the Select Committee. The committee reported in April 2003 and its report was considered on the Floor of the House a year later, in April 2004. Finally, most of the speeches in the debate at Second Reading of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill, just before the election this year, were about incitement to religious hatred. As the Select Committee noted, incitement to commit any criminal offence is itself a common law criminal offence, and there are specific statutory offences of incitement to commit particular offences such as provided in Section 4 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861. The committee agreed that there was no need for a statutory definition of religion, which presents no more difficult a jury point than race. Nor would there be a problem in accommodating a law on incitement with freedom of expression: the drafters of the ICCPR had placed Article 20(2) which prohibits incitement to both racial and religious hatred—both of them, note—next to Article 19, on freedom of expression. There would be only a small gap between incitement to commit a specific offence, and material which is or ought to be protected by Article 10(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights, so the number of prosecutions under legislation of this kind would be very small. Apart from the examples already mentioned, and which the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor gave, there was another interesting case which I would like to bring to your attention. A cleric who urged followers to kill non-believers, Americans, Hindus and Jews was jailed, first, for seven years for incitement to commit murder, and then an extra two years were added for incitement to racial hatred. If he had chosen his words more carefully and excluded Jews from this incitement, he would have been given only seven years and not nine. That is one of the answers to the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, whom I am sorry not to see here. Many cases come before the courts that are not covered by the aggravated offences to which noble Lords have agreed. There has been no discussion this afternoon. There was no problem about defining religion for those purposes. Apart from stand-alone offences of incitement to religious hatred, there may be other cases such as this one of the cleric who incited his followers to commit murder against members of a particular religion where an additional penalty might be awarded because of the nature of the religious incitement which accompanied the offence. After months of ill-informed comment by individuals such as Richard and Judy, Rowan Atkinson and Nicholas Hytner—who were given plenty of space on air and in the media to air their views and mislead their audience—it has been established that you can say more or less anything you like about people’s beliefs. If noble Lords are not happy about that, I suggest that they look at a website entitled Ship of Fools which ran a contest to find the 10 most offensive and the 10 funniest religious jokes. The ones that were supposed to be funny were fairly offensive and none of the offensive ones was very funny. But the exercise served to illustrate that, however hard you try, you cannot devise a form of words that ridicules holy objects which would be liable to prosecution under the Bill. That is because, as noble Lords have heard several times this afternoon—from the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor, and from the noble Baronesses, Lady Ramsay and Lady Whitaker—the Bill is designed to protect groups of believers, not their beliefs. I agree with the noble Baroness that this would become much clearer if the common law offence of blasphemy were repealed, making it crystal-clear that this provision has nothing to do with attacks on doctrines or objects perceived to be sacred. I have had several attempts at abolishing blasphemy and in 2001 two of the right reverend Prelates who took part in the discussions on the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Bill said that they would accept the abolition of blasphemy provided it was taken together with criminalisation of religious hatred. I hope that the Government will allow a free vote on the amendments that I will be tabling for that purpose.