May I start by drawing the Committee’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests?
The Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner constituency is a part of north-west London that has been shaped by generations of refugees, starting in the period around the second world war with large members of European Jews fleeing persecution. Successive waves of people have come from across the world, finding refuge and becoming part of our community. Understandably, I have a lot of views to share not just about this Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill, but about previous legislation that we have had on the issue of migration.
Although I will focus my contribution on the amendments around the role of the European convention and the European Court of Human Rights, it seems to me that, in a debate which at times has become quite philosophical, there is a wide recognition among our constituents that shared sovereignty is often in practice greater sovereignty. I am a big fan of those fine British philosophers, Hobbes and Locke, who talk about the social contract. It is clear that, when we work closely with our neighbours, we achieve the most effective measures against widespread, illegal and irregular migration flows. We have already seen effective work with the French authorities to tackle the activities of some of the gangs in northern France, which has contributed to bringing down the numbers crossing the channel.
In my contribution, I will attempt to add some further evidence to our deliberations in a way that I hope will help encourage Ministers and to emphasise my support for taking forward the Bill in its unamended form, as I know the Government seek to achieve. When we look at the role of sheer sovereignty, many examples well beyond that of the European Court and the European convention
on human rights have a significant bearing on the issue. We look at, for example, the United Nations convention on the law of the sea, which sets out the responsibilities that the United Kingdom and others have in the English channel in respect of refugee boats. That has frustrated the views of past Home Secretaries about how we might specifically tackle that issue, but we have yet to see a great deal of debate in this Chamber about why we should repudiate that convention, despite the fact that the International Maritime Organisation is based just across the river.
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The international tribunal that deals with the convention is based in Hamburg and could similarly be described as a foreign court. Indeed, our own Judicial Committee of the Privy Council acts as the Supreme Court of Appeal for a number of countries and jurisdictions around the world that are not part of the United Kingdom and that are not subject to UK law. Indeed, despite the fact that both the European convention and our own law prohibit the death penalty, our own Privy Council Committee, drawn from parliamentarians in the United Kingdom, has heard appeals, such as the Chandler case of 2011 regarding the death penalty in Trinidad and Tobago.
It is clear that there is a long and established history of nations coming together to establish international conventions, processes and tribunals to administer the law in the interests of not only our harmonious relationships with each other, but the longer-term and greater benefit of our citizens. In respect of that particular problem, it is clear that the work done by the late James Brokenshire when he was the Minister dealing with illegal migration to secure, in particular, the ports and railheads in northern France has contributed to the problem we face today, in that the people smugglers have nowhere else to go, other than small boats, which the Bill aims to stop.
A good deal has been said about the best way we can deal with the role of the European convention on human rights in the operation of the Bill and other matters arising from it. We know the ECHR is a very broad organisation. It came into being after the second world war, as we have heard. My argument for why we should reject the amendments to its role, and in particular those around interim measures, is that we already have an extensive series of levers that we can exercise to shape things. Indeed, the reason those interim measures exist is not merely that judges in the court decided they would like to have them, but because parliamentarians from the UK and other member states, other politicians, Ministers and Governments have argued for that court to take on a greater role over the years in response to the challenges. Some of those challenges have affected, for example, British citizens caught up in the conflict in Ukraine, where those interim measures have potentially influenced the safe return of those people to the United Kingdom.
We have the Council of Ministers—the directly appointed members of our Government who sit together and determine what the priorities of that convention and court should be. We have the Parliamentary Assembly. A good deal has been said about the role of the judges, and it is worth remembering at this point that the judges of our Supreme Court in the United Kingdom and, indeed, our entire judicial process are completely free of political interference.
The judges of the European Court of Human Rights are directly elected by parliamentarians from their member states. Indeed, the legal committee of the European convention on human rights in the Parliamentary Assembly is chaired by my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope), who I would hardly describe as a bourgeois liberal. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill), I think its characterisation as a foreign court is no more accurate than it is to say that the international tribunal for the law of the sea is a foreign court or, indeed, that our Judicial Committee of the Privy Council is a foreign court when it deals with matters at the request of other jurisdictions, which it does on a regular basis. Having served on the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of Europe, the local government element that looks at how those laws are handed down and implemented in practice, it is clear to me that we have a significant number of diplomatic and other levers that we can exercise if we feel that the court needs to move its practice in a different direction. It is also clear that the court has already begun that process in the light of comments from the United Kingdom and others.
My argument is that it is in our interest, because it benefits our citizens and our country, to maintain our membership of the European convention on human rights. The fact that we maintain our active support for and membership of that organisation underpins much of our public influence in the world and gives us the moral authority to ask others to do things. We can seek to address those issues using our elected Members of this House who sit in those assemblies, our elected politicians who sit in other assemblies such as the congress, and our academics and appointees who sit on bodies such as the Venice Commission, which advises on the gold standards for the conduct of elections. We can use all those levers at our disposal to convey our views to the court and the convention organisations about how we should proceed.
In respect of the judges themselves, it was very positive to hear from other hon. Members who have been part of that process, because we know that, contrary to what has sometimes been said, there is a two-stage process: for someone to be a candidate to be a judge, they have to meet the requirements for international judicial appointment in terms of both legal qualifications and relevant experience, and they are then put forward for election by the politicians who place them on the court. Their decisions, certainly in respect of the so-called pyjama injunctions, seem to be very little different from those that magistrates such as I and others across this country will be asked to take on matters of judicial warrants. We are asked to make a decision to enable an intervention to happen at a moment of urgency, and then in due course there is a longer period of opportunity for that to be considered by the courts and all others who may have a stake in it.