Police and Justice Bill

My name is also to the amendment. I rise to support the noble Baroness, Lady Linklater, and the noble Lord, Lord Judd. The naming and shaming policy introduced in the Crime and Disorder Act 1988 and extended in the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act is opposed by the Children’s Rights Alliance for England, which is made up of 13 very respected children’s organisations, and has been criticised by the chair of the Youth Justice Board and by the Human Rights Commissioner of the Council of Europe. As the noble Baroness says, it clearly puts us in default of our obligations under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, under Articles 3.1, 41 and others. A measure that has such heavyweight opposition and is in such clear breach of our international human rights obligations must bring enormous benefits in the prevention of crime and the promotion of public welfare if it is to be seen as a proportionate measure. There must be an enormously good reason for such a measure. I therefore hope that the Minister will be able to give us information on the benefits which this measure has brought. I have searched for information and research findings from the Home Office, the Youth Justice Board and other bodies on how effective these measures have been. So far, I have been able to find none, and one must assume that, so far, no concrete information is available which justifies this interference with basic rights. When the Government responded to the concerns of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, of which I am a member, about these measures to name and shame, they said that they would explore different avenues to ensure that courts were aware of Articles 3.1 and 40.1 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. I have searched for information on whether this has been done. I could find only a very recent guidance document, dated May 2006, from the Justices’ Clerks’ Society which sets out the law on publicity concerning youths in anti-social behaviour order proceedings. It makes no mention whatever of Articles 3.1 or 40.1 or any other aspect of the international human rights framework relating to such measures, nor does it make any mention of the concept of the best interests of the child or maintaining the child’s sense of dignity and worth. I echo others in saying that these measures impose further misery on families whose lives are usually full of misery and failure already. They add to that the stigmatisation and vilification of their neighbours, and they impose a stigma on all their family members, whether involved or not, that cannot be erased because the information is in the public domain, on the internet, for years. I also follow the noble Lord, Lord Judd, in putting on the record that everyone deplores the way in which some communities have become appalling places to live because of social breakdown. The solution, however, is not to give some people in that community the chance to stigmatise and vilify others; it is the opposite—measures to promote social cohesion and mutual respect; and we know what those measures are. The measures which allow those names to be put in the public domain do the opposite and add to social breakdown. In that sense, I wholeheartedly support the amendment.