My Lords, I will say a couple of things about Northern Ireland, following the noble Lord, Lord Dodds of Duncairn, although I suspect from a very different perspective. First, as I pointed out in Committee, the Joint Committee on Human Rights asked for a full explanation before Report. We are almost at the end of Report and, as far as I am aware, despite all the talk of imminence, we still do not have the Government’s response to the JCHR’s report. I very much support what the noble Lord, Lord Alton, said about that earlier—it really is not good enough.
I turn to the disapplication of human rights and the implications for the Good Friday agreement and the Windsor Framework. I know I will not change the Government’s mind on this, but I say this partly to amplify what was said earlier and put this on the record. The cases that the noble Lord referred to have been brought to my attention. In their revised fact sheet—and in almost identical words in a letter to me—the Government said that
“the bill does not engage the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement, including the rights chapter - those rights seek to address longstanding and specific issues relating to Northern Ireland’s past and do not extend to matters engaged by the bill”.
But the cases to which the noble Lord referred made something absolutely clear. The 28 February decision in the 2024 case of Dillon and others—NIKB 11 —referenced the overarching commitment to civil rights in the relevant chapter of the Belfast Good/Friday agreement. It said in paragraph 554:
“A narrow interpretation of ‘civil rights’ undermines the forward-facing dimension of the non-diminution commitment in article 2(1)”.
It says it is “future-facing”; it is made clear that it is not looking just to the past.
Similarly, in Angesom, which was also referred to by the noble Lord, the decision said:
“The court rejects the submission by the respondent that the rights protected by the relevant part of the GFA are frozen in time and limited to the political context of 1998. The GFA was drafted with the protection of EU fundamental human rights in mind and was therefore intended to protect the human rights of ‘everyone in the community’ even ‘outside the background of the communal conflict’”.
So I do not think that what the Government have come up with so far is good enough in explaining why they believe that the disapplication of the Human Rights Act does not apply and will not affect the Good Friday agreement and the Windsor Framework.