European Communities (Definition of Treaties) (United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities) Order 2009

I should begin by declaring an interest as chair of the board of the United Nations Association of the United Kingdom, because my association lobbied Ministers on behalf of the early ratification of this convention with the minimum of reservations and interpretative declarations. I thank the Minister and the Government for bringing forward these measures, which clear the way to ratification in what I think can be politely described as a reasonably prompt timeframe, and for having reduced the list of reservations below what some of us feared initially was going to be the case. I also welcome the UK’s agreement that the EU as such can sign and ratify this treaty. That is right for the reasons given by the Minister. I would just like him to state in his reply whether our national ratification will be able to go ahead promptly when the procedures are complete, even if the EU takes longer to get its act together, or whether we are chained together. It would help to have that point clarified. That is about where the good news ends. Like the noble Lord, Lord Lester, I distinctly dislike some of the reservations and would argue that they are unnecessary. In some cases, they are a little like Don Quixote; there is a tendency to tilt at windmills. I shall take them in a slightly different order from the noble Lord, but follow the path he has laid. With regard to equal recognition before the law, I accept that the proposed review the Government are going to undertake by a competent, independent and impartial authority into the issue of persons appointed to claim and collect benefits is necessary, that it may not be complete before ratification, and that it therefore justifies a reservation. I hope that it will be carried out with urgency. Perhaps the Minister can say something about the timeframe, as the noble Lord, Lord Lester, asked. Will the outcome be reported to Parliament? I would hope so. Will the Government lift the reservation if the review concludes that such a reservation is not necessary? The Minister pretty well said that in his opening, and if he said it categorically, I apologise for asking him to repeat it. Then there is the military reservation. I, too, do not believe that this reservation is either necessary or desirable. The case of the exemption from the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 for police and fire services, which was lifted in 2005 as it was deemed unnecessary, points to strong arguments for saying that it is not needed and that this would not impose an unnecessary burden on the Armed Forces. This situation sounds similar to me in that both the police and the fire services undertake tasks as onerous—in fact, in this day and age, every bit as onerous—as those of the Armed Forces. A blanket ban is not justified. Is there an intention in any other EU country to make such a reservation for the Armed Forces? If not, that is surely another powerful argument for saying that it is not necessary. On the question of mainstream and special schools, this reservation and the interpretative declaration seem at least to risk to contradict the commitment of the Department for Children, Schools and Families to develop an inclusive system. As the noble Lord, Lord Lester, has said, countries that have taken a similar approach to our own, like Australia, New Zealand and Germany, are not making similar declarations or reservations. Why are they not doing so if there is an incompatibility? As the noble Lord said, fewer than 16 per cent of disabled children in Germany get inclusive schooling, and yet that country appears not to require any kind of reservation. Fourthly, there is the question of the liberty of movement and nationality, which seems to be an entirely unnecessary and undesirable reservation. Why can we not make do with an interpretative declaration of the kind that has been made by Australia? It is well drafted, clear and precise, and I do not understand why that does not suffice. As the noble Lord, Lord Lester, said, a similar reservation we made on the Convention on the Rights of the Child has now been withdrawn, so why put one back in here? I end by expressing the hope that the Government will reconsider. I welcome the open-mindedness displayed by the Minister when he introduced this debate, pointing out that the Government have not yet reached the final point of decision and will reduce these reservations before we proceed to ratification. The reason for doing so, I would argue, is not so much because of our reputation but because we would set an extremely unfortunate example to a lot of other countries that are probably less liberal and less meticulous—some might say less pernickety—than we are. Festooning our ratification with these reservations merely opens the door for others to make use of them and say that they are merely doing what the United Kingdom has done. They would say that everyone understands that the United Kingdom is a well developed country that has thought these things through, and so why should they not as well? The problem, therefore, is that if we open this door, we are acting not only against the interests of disabled people in this country but against their interests worldwide because we are enabling such reservations to be entered into by countries that are probably a good deal less advanced than we are in looking after the interests, and furthering the equality, of disabled people. I hope that the Minister and the departments for which he is speaking will see their way to a sharp reduction in the number of reservations.