Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

I follow my noble friend from a rather different angle in supporting the amendment tabled by the noble Earl, Lord Onslow. When I retired from the public service some 20 years ago, I found myself, rather to my surprise, as chairman of the British branch of the United Nations Children's Fund. One of our first tasks in the years that followed was the negotiation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which we made a considerable contribution that was not always well received by Governments in this country. Looking at the terms of Clause 9 in Part 2, which deals with sentencing, I can say that those of us who have operated in the field of international child welfare find it a strange reaction because it appears that we are still concentrating on sentencing rather than on the rights and needs of the child. From my background, that looks like a very odd approach.