My Lords, it is a real privilege to support my noble friend Lord Pannick in this debate on whether these clauses should stand part of the Bill. As he has said, back in the 1990s, in another life, he and I used to travel to Strasbourg together to fight prisoners’ cases on prisons law. It is no exaggeration at all to say that I acquired most of my public law knowledge from working with and learning from my noble friend on these and other issues.
Prisons issues back in the 1990s were at the very cutting edge of the development of human rights law. Here we are again, about 30 years later, discussing basic human rights for prisoners such as the right to marry and to form a civil partnership. But it is about much more than that. It is about how as a society we treat those we lock up. Someone said, it may have been Gandhi, that the way we treat those we imprison is a measure of how civilised we are—