Lisbon Treaty (No. 3)

Yes, I can confirm that. If my hon. Friend glances at article 6 of the treaty he will see that the charter is incorporated in full as a fully binding legal document. It attains exactly the same status as the treaty and all EU law. That is a very important point. This is an unhappy outcome for the Government; all the way through the Convention on the Future of Europe they tried to prevent it. They tabled amendments, which were not successful, and there was a sorry series of retreats from assertions made, and indeed from promises given to the House, about the status of the charter—that it would never be legally binding—to giving in and now trying to make the best of a bad job. Of course, the Government had a veto over the whole process. They should have made their red lines clear at the start of the negotiations, rather than come up with self-selected red lines at the end to try to show that our rights and powers had been protected. No one has answered the question, ““Why do we need the charter?”” The European convention on human rights is much older, dating back to 1950, and it is already embedded in the EU, which is required to give effect to its general principles. That is in article 6 of the treaty on European Union. Of course, all member states are signed up to the ECHR. It has not been explained why we need a separate, overlapping charter, with its own case law to create more confusion. In my view, it is part of the EU's determination always to have a monopoly on legal rights and legal order. It is contemptuous and suspicious of any other organisation, whether legal, social or political, that might be a competitor. On the remarkable story of whether the charter contains new rights, I intervened on the Secretary of State for Justice to point out that the Government's often repeated claim that there are no new rights is simply and flatly untrue. Just to remind the House, article 13 of the charter says that"““scientific research shall be free of constraint.””" The explanatory notes confirm that that right is not recorded in any other document to which we are a party. That is a new right. When I was criticised on that point by the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr. Davey), I pointed out to him that I opposed the right because I believe that Parliament should restrain scientific research from time to time, in the interests of animal welfare and so on. He then said that he, too, was in favour of such matters being decided in Parliament, so he contradicted himself in the space of 15 seconds. Perhaps it is no surprise that he does not understand the issue.