Human Rights

It is a pleasure to follow the Chairman of the Joint Committee on Human Rights. I would have said that this was a timely debate, except that I fear that the time for it was possibly five or six years ago—it should have been held annually since—in order to counter some of the mythology that has, unfortunately, grown around the Human Rights Act. I congratulate the Lord Chancellor and the hon. and learned Lady on what they are doing. I do not say this often, but even the Attorney-General is encompassed in that big tent of praise for addressing some of the arguments that should be put forcefully about the value of the Act. It is an enormously valuable Act. In fact, I think it is the most important Act that the Labour Government have put through. It enshrines the foundations of a civilised society, which is important. It provides for the defence not of the criminal, but of the citizen against the state. That is important. It allows attacks on those rights that we have as citizens of this country to be remedied within a British court, rather than a court in Strasbourg and that is right and proper as well. That is why I find it difficult to understand some of the arguments that have been advanced against the Act. The mythology surrounding the Act has built up over the past six years. Newspapers, many of which should know better, have promulgated basic untruths about the implications of the Act. The culmination was when one tabloid newspaper last year proudly announced that it was leading a campaign, not against the Human Rights Act, but against human rights. To use the tabloid phrase, you could not make it up. I thought that this country was very proud of standing up for human rights and the rights of the citizen, yet a major British newspaper was campaigning against human rights. I am sorry to say this, particularly to the hon. Member for North-West Norfolk (Mr. Bellingham), but those newspapers have been aided and abetted by the Conservative party. In the past few years, I have often joined with in trying to defend the rights of the citizen against the Government in terms of civil liberties and human rights. Often, in arguing against what the Government have proposed, I have quoted from these Benches the articles of the European convention on human rights and heard that argument echoed by the Conservative Front-Bench spokesmen, yet the Conservative party, for opportunistic and badly informed reasons, has decided that there is something to be gained by portraying the Human Rights Act as being inimical to human rights in this country—I do not believe that it is—and as something that it wishes to get rid of.