European Union (Amendment) Bill

I shall very briefly intervene in this debate. The noble Lord, Lord Lamont, made only one point on which I wish to follow him because I fundamentally disagreed with everything else that he said. He raised the possibility of European Union accession to the European Convention on Human Rights. That is very much in the treaty. I have not followed the amendments through that far yet, but I would assume that Her Majesty’s loyal Opposition are opposing that in the same way as they oppose everything else. Just in case they are not, I hope that they will join in the appeals that are being made universally, almost, to the Russian Government to get them to ratify protocol 14, which is the fundamental requirement in the Council of Europe for the accession of the European Union to the European convention to take place. Forty-six member states have so far ratified protocol 14; only one state has not. I hope that all noble Lords want to see that take place, as it will be a protection against some of the fears that they have expressed, which will be somewhat mitigated by the fact of European Union accession and binding itself to the judgments of the European court. To start back where the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, began, he appeared singly uncomfortable in moving his amendment. I was somewhat surprised that he had to keep going through green-backed documents to find selective quotations from the Select Committee in another place. I wondered whether that was because of the quality of the reports from the Constitution Committee and the European Union Committee in this House. Those reports were much less easy to fillet appropriate quotations from that supported his argument. The quotations were not particularly helpful and he would have done much better to stick clearly to the words in the charter and, in particular, the very clear words in the protocol on the application of the Charter of Fundamental Rights to Poland and the United Kingdom.