I rise to speak to amendments 121 and 123 to 127, which are tabled in my name, and in support of amendment 1, tabled in the name of the hon. Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock), who speaks for the official Opposition, and to which I have added my name. I tabled my amendments as Chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights. I will not press them to a vote, because the Joint Committee has only just commenced our legal scrutiny of this Bill. That is not because we are dilatory in any way, but because the Bill has been bounced on us at such short notice. We have very little time to undertake that scrutiny, but we hope to report before the Bill has finished its passage through the House of Lords. At that point, I hope we will be able to recommend some detailed amendments with the backing of the whole Committee.
I did wonder whether it was worth my while spending hours in the Chamber this afternoon waiting to speak in detail to any of these amendments, as after six hours of debate yesterday, the Minister made no attempt whatever to address any of the detailed points raised by
those speaking to Opposition amendments. We do not expect the Minister to agree with us, but we expect him at least to do us the courtesy of addressing what we have bothered to say, not just on behalf of our constituents, but on behalf of civic society and so on. That is how democratic scrutiny works.
There is no point in Government Members banging on about the sovereignty of this Parliament when the Government ignore most or all of the substantive points raised by Opposition Members during legislative scrutiny. That is not how a Bill Committee is supposed to work, and I appeal to the Minister to remember his duties not just to the Government and his political party, but to this Parliament and the constitution of this so-called parliamentary democracy. The way we are legislating in this House at the moment is an absolute disgrace. A Bill Committee is supposed to be line-by-line scrutiny. This fairly lengthy Bill raises huge issues in respect of our international legal obligations, as well as huge moral issues, but we have not conducted anything like line-by-line scrutiny.
If I am supposed to keep my comments to 10 minutes, I will barely scrape the surface of the amendments that I have tabled, which have not been dreamt out of thin air, but are informed by detailed legal scrutiny of the Bill by the lawyers who advise my Committee. Many of the amendments are informed by the existing unanimous report of the Joint Committee on Human Rights on the Bill of Rights. This Bill sneaks in some of the things that were going to be in the Bill of Rights.
Yesterday, I spent a long time addressing in some detail the legal reasons, under reference to the convention and case law of the European Court of Human Rights, why it would breach the convention for the Government to ignore interim orders of the Court. I also explained how very rarely interim orders are passed in respect of the United Kingdom. The Minister just completely and crassly ignored every single point I sought to make. Frankly, his behaviour in failing to address any of the Opposition amendments makes a mockery of this Parliament and it makes a mockery of all their singing and dancing and fuss about the sovereignty of this Parliament.