I have sources that I was looking at to research this speech. I will send my hon. Friend the links that I have to the European Court web pages that deal with several meetings held in the summer and November last year where the proposals were agreed. Now, the question is implementation in 2024. The Court has not been specific about precisely when these reforms will be brought in. Therefore, now is our opportunity not just as a Parliament but as a Government, together with other member states, to say, “Look, these are welcome. Can you please bring them in?” Hopefully, it will bring them in a way that dovetails with the eventual coming into force of these provisions. My hon. Friend makes an important point, and I will send that information to him.
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On the binding nature, I made the point that these are not final judgments, so they are not binding in the sense that article 46 bites, and therefore we have a prisoner voting scenario. However, procedurally they have to be abided by, since as a matter of procedure in our own domestic courts, if an injunction is passed, it will be potentially a contempt of that court for any party to those proceedings to do something that would defeat the injunction. My hon. Friend will know that. For example, if there is an injunction to prevent the removal of a particular asset from the jurisdiction, removing it would frustrate the whole purpose of litigation and would be contempt of court. My hon. Friend gets the point.
That is why it is not necessary to add clause 5. We all know the arguments. If we do add it, we get the unfortunate consequence of having to consider the ministerial code and the civil service code. I agree with my hon. Friend—I took the view at the time of the United Kingdom Internal Markets Act 2020 that the drafting of part 3, which never became law, was not a breach of the ministerial code or the civil service code. It was entirely in order, and we were able to do that. That is when I parted company with my good friend Sir Jonathan Jones, the former Treasury solicitor. I did not agree with him about that. I know my hon. Friend would approve of that.
There are other parts of part 3 of the 2020 Act that we need to bring forward in legislation to help our colleagues such as the hon. Member for Belfast East, who nods sagely from a sedentary position. We need to do that. We brought forward that legislation and the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill as a way of leveraging the negotiations, and we were successful. We managed to sort that out through the joint committee between my right hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) and Maroš Šefčovič, which came to a conclusion on the protocol. From the Protocol Bill we have the Windsor framework. We have different views about that, but that Bill was not necessary. That is why
I say in all candour to my hon. and learned Friend the Minister that we are using the Bill not as a way to leverage negotiation but as a direct enactment of policy. That is why we have to be very careful about it.
I now come to the points made by the hon. Member for Belfast East and the intervention from the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy). We cannot ignore the Northern Ireland dimension. We have seen two very good, nuanced arguments, first about the interaction between the EU charter of fundamental rights and Northern Ireland law, and secondly about the position of the European convention itself and its centrality to the Belfast/Good Friday agreement, which I think we all agree is a fact, whatever our views.
To come back to the point about the EU dimension, the Supreme Court was clear in its judgment about the Rwandan applications relating to cases before it, that there was no role for retained EU law. What the Court said was very clear. The European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 was clear that retained EU law no longer applied to the procedures directive, which was the particular directive that we were talking about. However, the hon. Member for Belfast East is right to sound the alarm bells to make sure that we do not inadvertently end up in a position where our immigration law is divided or complicated by the EU law factor, which is undeniably an issue in Northern Ireland law.