My Lords, I put my name to a couple of these amendments and I would like to speak to them. Under our constitutional arrangements, the Human Rights Act is the next best thing that we have to a constitutional guarantee of fundamental rights and freedoms. The noble Earl the Minister has rightly put his name on the front of the Bill, stating that in his opinion it is compatible with the convention rights. I have put my name to these
amendments to seek to make sure that what the Minister has put on the face of the Bill becomes transparently clear in the statute when it is enacted.
Article 8 of the convention, which guarantees the right to personal privacy, indicates that any exception must be provided by law—that is to say, satisfy legal certainty—and by the principle of proportionality, and that any interference must be necessary and no more than necessary to safeguard other compelling public interests. The problem with the Bill as drafted is that it does not go quite far enough to ensure full compliance with the Human Rights Act and with Article 8 of the convention. That is why the amendments in the name of my noble friend Lady Hamwee are needed, in my view. First, it is important not merely to have regard to but to make sure that there is full compliance with the principle of proportionality. That is what these amendments seek. Secondly, without repeating what has already been said, it is very important that the obligations on public authorities—for example, not to use the powers listed in Clause (2)(1)—are no more than what,
“could reasonably be achieved by other less intrusive means”.
That is classic principle of proportionality language.
I very much hope that in one way or another the Government will come to accept these amendments or something very similar to them so that we can make sure that lawyers like me are not able to go to court to challenge all of this under the Human Rights Act, but that Parliament gets the statute clear to put beyond doubt the application of the principles of legal certainty and proportionality, which is what these amendments are designed to do.
I will say just a word about Amendment 14, not because I want to make an elaborate statement about it but because, as I said at Second Reading, it is very important that we have a board or commission with the requisite powers. I will come to that in later debates on the Bill.