My Lords, in all this discussion, not enough is said about the horror of what was experienced in the years leading up to the Good Friday agreement. We are forgetting that. In the language of decency in the House of Lords, we are allowing ourselves to somehow not remember the full horror of that period. That horror was rooted in inequality, a lack of rights for certain people in the community, and a strong sense that the only way towards peace was to somehow protect the rights and equalities of people in Northern Ireland. You would not have got people to the table if there had not been a very honest discussion about the pain, loss and suffering that came out of those inequalities. I can say this as somebody who did more trials involving those Troubles than probably anybody in this House.
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The noble Lord, Lord Bew, said that the primacy of the Good Friday agreement is there in the protocol. All I can say is, let us remind ourselves of that and what was at the heart of the Good Friday agreement: a recognition that the platform on which rights were being premised was the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Court of Justice’s protection of rights. So, when it came to the protocol, a formula had to be found to protect rights. One of the things
that was part of that commitment was that, in order to deal with the strong sense of injustice that had led to the Good Friday agreement, there should be no diminution of rights going forward, and that in the protocol we would be committing ourselves to making sure that rights would follow into Northern Ireland as they developed in Europe. Of course, that is one of the things that members of the DUP are not too happy about. They do not like the idea that there might ultimately be some place in which solutions are found when there is conflict over rights and the development of rights.
Noble Lords will remember that at the heart of the whole Brexit debate was the idea that we had to disentangle ourselves from European courts. There is still a whole section of the UKIP-driven Conservative Party that even wants to leave the European Convention on Human Rights. This House should not forget that rights and equality and the pursuit of them was part and parcel of the Good Friday agreement. That is why people are sensitive; it is not talked about sufficiently in this House.
If we are to have impact statements, and if we have some time to look at what the implications of the Bill might be, I would like us to look at its implications when it comes to that very carefully drawn set of protections for rights and equality in Northern Ireland which was at the basis of the Good Friday agreement, and which has to be still in our minds as we talk about the protocol. I am afraid that that is being lost in the whole business of whether there are going to be tariffs and so on. Of course, those matters are of vital importance, but there are other rights in here as well. That is why I am in favour of some delay, because I would like to see a proper assessment of the impact of the Bill, in a deep way, on that carefully wrought Good Friday agreement, which was about rights and equality as much as other things—actually, it was fundamentally about that.
I also want to know why we are not seeing the legal opinion which says what our position is with regard to international law. There is not a lawyer in this House who does not agree that this is an affront to international law, as I mentioned last time. On Monday of this week there was a meeting in this House about the treatment of Jimmy Lai in Hong Kong. He is a media owner being put on trial under the new national security law because of the erosion of the rule of law in Hong Kong. We want to say that that is an affront to international law because of the agreement made with China over Hong Kong’s future, but how can we say that with any kind of respect in the world when we are doing this to another international treaty because it has become inconvenient to us? That really is wrong, and I would like an impact assessment on the human rights implications of this piece of legislation.