Human Rights

I admire the way in which the hon. Gentleman engages so relentlessly and comprehensively with these issues. My view is that human rights legislation deepens democracy and does not diminish it in any way. The hon. Member for Stone (Mr. Cash) described pre-legislative scrutiny for human rights—that is, the human rights-proofing of legislation—as undemocratic. No, it is not. A Minister introducing a Bill is required to inform Parliament that in his or her opinion a Bill is not incompatible with convention rights and it is then for Parliament to decide whether he or she is right and whether the Bill should be enacted. The hon. Member for Portsmouth, South (Mr. Hancock) raised the issue of public authority, and I hope that I have already dealt with our position on that. We tried to intervene twice in cases to clarify the point. He, too, seems to suggest that tracing public cash from a public source right through to the ultimate recipient is the way to depict that the recipient must be a public authority. That seems to go a long way. He asked why we did not publish the strategic review commissioned by Sir Hayden Phillips. The reason is that although it gave us a picture of the situation in 2004, things had moved on considerably by 2006, so it is not such a useful depiction as he suggests. The hon. Gentleman repeated his main question in an intervention on me and in his speech, and it was about how the Department for Constitutional Affairs would drive the agenda through. All central Government Departments have been offered the new guidance, and there is printed guidance and guidance on the website. Most Departments have received many copies of the guidance, and I am reliably informed that 43,000 copies have already been distributed, although I do not know who has counted them. Each local authority across England and Wales has had six handbooks, 12 summaries and lots more have been ordered. Every police constabulary, every probation service and every youth offending team in England and Wales have received all the guidance. As I said in my opening speech, it is the Lord Chancellor’s intention that he should meet representative bodies to push the agenda forward and he intends that all his Ministers will do similarly. I hope therefore that I have satisfied the hon. Gentleman that there is a real intention to promote the issue. The hon. Gentleman asked why we could not give more funding to the European Court and the Council of Europe, which are strapped for cash. It is correct that the European Court is suffering a huge backlog, but the problems are systemic. For example, it receives a huge number of inadmissible and repetitive claims and the court’s problems cannot really be addressed by further injections of cash, at least not on their own. That is not the answer. Protocol 14 to the ECHR is designed to address the systemic problems of the court and to try to clear the backlog. The hon. Gentleman questioned why we would not give the court more cash, but it is our intention that it should function fully. We have strongly supported protocol 14 with that intention. The hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) champions the freedom of conscience for Christians. He is a former Back-Bench colleague on a Committee and I enjoyed his conversation then as I enjoyed his contribution now as, in a sense, he engaged in a different debate. There is nothing inconsistent between the values of the ECHR and Christianity, and there is nothing in the ECHR that reduces the freedom of conscience for Christians or gives them less value than the freedom of conscience for other people. There is nothing that prevents Christian motivation from doing public good and I know that he will agree that the motivation to do good is desirable whether it comes from Christians, humanists or atheists. When he considers, as he did, what values we could collect around to unify people in this country, the values implicit in the Human Rights Act give us a perfect target around which we could marshal ourselves. The hon. Member for Harwich (Mr. Carswell) would take us back to pre-war days to stop us being influenced by what he called ““some charter””. I can agree with only one point that he made: our human rights culture has been a tad vague. We intend, as I have said, to sharpen it up. That brings me to the contribution of the hon. Member for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis), who spoke of needing a schedule of rights that was, in effect, a short list made up of a few absolute rights and in which all the rest were provisional. That is exactly what we have got. The ECHR is a short list of rights, only a few of which, such as those against torture, slavery and retrospective penalties, are absolute. Most of the rest are limited, such as that on the right to family life, or qualified, such as the fact that the right to freedom of speech must be balanced against other people’s rights. I am very glad to be able to grant the hon. Gentleman’s wish this evening. I must say that I enjoyed his discursion on Popper. I used to have a dog called Poppy, and one or two friends thought I was so pretentious that the dog was actually called Popper. The hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) is undoubtedly a supporter of human rights. He raised the same point about the Council of Europe, and I hope that I have dealt with it satisfactorily. He suggested that the JCHR should take responsibility for declaring whether a draft Bill was compatible with convention rights. I do not agree. If I am putting forward a Bill as a Minister, it is my responsibility to say whether, in my view, it is compatible. That must be done as early as possible so that the JCHR can, as it regularly does, report, comment and inform debate in the House. It is a good idea for the declaration of compatibility to have reasoning attached to it so as to help the Committee with its task.