Lisbon Treaty (No. 3)

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Oldham, West and Royton (Mr. Meacher). He made an important speech that exemplified the extent to which rights, or at least some rights, are essentially political and economic in their origin and their importance. It should therefore perhaps be political and economic matters that lead to their definition and implementation. All parties and all Members in this House are in favour of basic human rights—what we normally mean by human rights, which do not extend into the sphere of certain economic rights. All parties have always supported human rights, yet successive Governments have opposed the implementation into treaty law of a charter of human rights. Why is that? Why have successive UK Governments, including this one, opposed the implementation at a European level of a justiciable charter of human rights? The matter would be clearer if the Government would do as I asked in my point of order at the start of the debate. For the convenience of the debate, they should table information about the positions that they took during the negotiations on the European constitutional treaty and the European Convention. Only then will we be able to see clearly what is from time to time referred to by those who are more knowledgeable than the rest of us—notably my right hon. Friend the Member for Wells (Mr. Heathcoat-Amory), who participated in that Convention. I hope that either now or when she sums up, the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, the hon. Member for Lewisham, East (Bridget Prentice), will promise that in future, each day, alongside all the other documents that are supplied to inform our debates, we will have on the Table the resolutions that the Government moved and the terms in which they moved them during the Convention, so that we will know what the Government's position is or was.