My Lords, the breadth of the compassion of my noble friend Lady Cox is equalled only by the depth of her energy. I am astonished, as I think we all are, by what she accomplishes for human rights right around the world. We are very lucky that she has focused today on this particular important human rights situation. She started more or less by saying that all are equal under the law and that no person, organisation or ethnic group, no religious persuasion and no speaker of a foreign language is exempt from the law, either from its constraints or from its protection, unless the law so provides. Where it exists to protect the weak from the strong, it must be known to the weak so that they can seek its shelter, and to the strong so that they know the limits of their authority. If the law is to be effective, it must therefore be as clearly expressed as legislators can make it. It follows that where it applies for those who do not speak English, it must be available to them in their own tongue.
If practices or a system of practices developed under a different jurisdiction or culture are established in this country and are recognised to be incompatible with the judicature or culture of our own country, the law must be developed to prohibit them. Where that practice or set of practices result in serious harm to individuals, the application must be swift. It follows, perhaps controversially, that that application should not wait on the painstaking development of case law or interpretation; that is, of statutory law as it exists. It should be applied, as is now proposed, by legislation. If it is in contravention of any point of existing law, which I very much doubt, it needs to be amended. If it is not, I suggest that the remedy of overlap should surely await consolidation.
In the present case, we are dealing with matters of great importance and very great sensitivity. The practices at which the Bill is directed have arisen in a particular religious persuasion and perhaps within particular ethnic groups. It is therefore of the greatest importance that it is made absolutely clear that it is the practices themselves, and only the practices themselves, at which the Bill is directed. As has been drawn to your Lordships’ attention, it is so drawn that if they occur in any group—religious, ethnic, cultural, linguistic or any other—it will bear equally heavily upon them. That is how it should be, and that is exactly what the Bill achieves.
The next task is surely to see that there is a mechanism for getting an understanding of this to all those affected by reliable machinery, supervised by those who are empowered to enforce it, and that it should be in their language and, most difficult of all, if they cannot read, it should be given to them verbally. That is of great importance in this particular case. I repeat my admiration and thanks to the noble Baroness. I apologise for beating the same drum as many other noble Lords; I just hope that the rhythm has been slightly different.
11.12 am