Human Rights

As the Chairman of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, I welcome this long overdue debate. I hope that we shall hear some rather more informed and accurate contributions from the Opposition than the one we just heard. We must and can show that the Human Rights Act is not just about minorities or criminals and terrorists. We must and can clearly demonstrate that it provides essential rights for the elderly, children, those with physical or mental illness and disability, the homeless, and every single citizen—each one of us—in our dealings with the state in all its forms. It must not simply be a lawyers’ gravy train. It must mainstream decency and fair play throughout our public services. Recently, the Joint Committee produced a report on the odious crime of people trafficking, highlighting HRA duties to protect the victims of this modern-day slave trade. The Government responded positively by accepting our recommendation that we should sign up to the European convention against this crime. We are about to embark on an inquiry into the treatment of the elderly in hospitals and care homes, and their access to what can be expensive treatments, and I expect that that will be seen to be a popular cause. However, I make no apologies for the fact that we are also prepared to stand up for less popular, often demonised, groups who do not have the ear of the media or general public sympathy. A case in point is our current inquiry into the treatment of asylum seekers—not who is or is not one, but how the system treats them. The Government have consistently referred to the need to entrench human rights as a package of shared values, with rights tempered by the responsibilities we have to each other and to the wider community. Those rights themselves are not alien to the United Kingdom, nor were they imposed by some distant European body. In fact, the convention was in large part drafted by the British, based on our ancient, traditional, basic rights and values. Respect for those rights and everything that goes with them should help to change the way in which people think and behave, creating an atmosphere in which decisions and policies are discussed and understood. The basic aim of the Human Rights Act was to bring rights home, so that British residents did not face a long and expensive journey to Strasbourg to ensure that they are enforced, which would be the consequence of the policy advanced by the Opposition. Clear examples can be given of how the Act has benefited individuals who would have had no redress at home without it. We have already heard about the local authority that wanted to separate a couple who had been married for decades by putting them in separate care homes when they could not look after themselves. Action under the Human Rights Act prevented that. The adult children of an elderly woman who was fed her breakfast while sitting on a commode used the Human Rights Act to argue that that was against her human rights, and stopped the mistreatment.