I beg to move, That this House do now adjourn.

Fundamental rights have been recognised throughout our history from the time of Magna Carta. They have not always been protected very well, but there has always been an understanding that the machinery of the state, however democratically it acquired its power, could not ride roughshod over the governed. In the Human Rights Act 1998, which incorporated the rights from the European convention, we have a mechanism by which our values are given greater protection and greater status than ever before. We have all grown up with those values, but until that Act came into force in October 2000, we would have had to go to Strasbourg to enforce them.

In the aftermath of the horrific events of the second world war, international powers worked out values around which humanity could unite and could be entrenched and made inalienable. The United Nations declaration of human rights set out those rights, but gave no practical help on their enforcement. The United Kingdom was keen on a new Europe-wide statement of human rights with some practical mechanisms. Both the UN declaration and that more practical document, the European convention on human rights, were heavily influenced by British values. The British inspired the debate, the drafting was led by the British and the values entrenched were British through and through.

I am grateful for that exercise in history, but it is not entirely accurate. The hon. and learned Lady should know that the Attlee Government were very concerned about this, as was the Lord Chancellor of the day, and the convention passed because of the assumption that it could have no consequences in domestic law.

Thanks for that parallel history lesson.

The convention provided substantive protection for individuals against the violation of their rights by states. It ensured that the principles of democracy were strengthened by giving citizens a forum in which they could be heard if a Government—even a democratically elected Government—sought to deny basic fundamental rights. That was a key step forward in enhancing democratic answerability. The European convention also declared those rights strongly, thus elevating the position of rights in society. It still does all those things.

The convention was never intended to be a precise legislative document. The drafters recognised that rights could come into conflict with each another, so a solution was prescribed: flexibility. The ideal realisation of that flexibility was to let sovereign Governments determine the balance of rights in the context of their national circumstances and then let national courts determine whether that balance was correct in those circumstances. That flexibility allows what we in the UK would call local common sense to be engaged. Of course, British citizens had been going to the Strasbourg Court to enforce those rights against the UK Government, and that Court had done its best to understand the British context, but we did not have a national forum and the opportunity to maximise that local flexibility until the Human Rights Act made the convention rights enforceable here, as part of our domestic law.

The hon. and learned Lady refers to conflict between the principles set out in the Human Rights Act. Will she concede that it is extremely difficult in present-day circumstances—it was before, but is much more so today—to reconcile the rights in article 11, which deals with matters such as freedom of conscience and of religion, and rights such as freedom of speech? Those inherent conflicts are part of the problem when there is an inability to provide for a hierarchy of principles.

But the hon. Gentleman knows that those rights existed before the mechanism, and the mechanism is an excellent one for balancing rights against one another.

No one would dispute the importance of the rights; the right to life and not to be tortured, the prohibition of slavery, the rights to liberty, to a fair trial and not to be punished without legal authority, respect for private life and family life, the rights to freedom of thought, of expression and of assembly, and the right not to be discriminated against in the exercise of those rights. They give expression to the values of our society. They are common sense; what the person in the street, here and now, would expect our values to be. We all share them. They are rights that we have grown up with. These are human rights. The question is not whether those rights and the values that they represent are the right ones, but what is the best way that they can be given expression and protection under our law, and how can we use them positively to add value in our day-to-day lives?

It is an irony that bringing our rights home, in the sense of making them enforceable here rather than in Strasbourg, somehow conspired to make rights to which we are all accustomed seem more alien and foreign, in particular for front-line public authority workers who have to work with them in the mainstream of their day-to-day business. At the very time that we are best able to use our local common sense to apply them, the use of human rights has sometimes produced results that make nonsense instead of common sense.

People’s rights have to be practical. They have to work in such a way that they can resolve conflicts—day-to-day conflicts, where the rights of the individual have to be balanced against the rights of the community. In the vast majority of cases, common sense tells us how to resolve those conflicts. Let me give a couple of examples. In January, there was a well publicised row about a decision by Derbyshire police not to release, supposedly on human rights grounds—I am not pointing a finger at what was said or who said it—photographs of convicted criminals who had escaped from prison. Their crimes were serious and included murder. The idea that the human rights of people convicted of such crimes could trump the legitimate use of photographs in trying to recapture the criminals is nonsense. Article 8 specifically recognises that interference with the right to privacy, which it gives, is justified if it is necessary in the interest of national security, public safety and the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, or for other reasons including the protection of others.

Alternatively, take the case in which a man evading arrest in Gloucestershire went on to the roof of a house and while there, surrounded by the police, was supplied with—supposedly—Kentucky Fried Chicken. Gloucestershire police were quoted—rightly or wrongly—as saying that they had to look after his human rights, even though he was a bit of a nuisance. There is no Human Rights Act entitlement to Kentucky Fried Chicken—as a vegetarian, I welcome that, although I do not suppose it would ever be compulsory—and there is no right that can sensibly be interpreted to give such an entitlement. It was nonsense.

Will the Minister clarify the meaning of paragraph 50 of the Government response to the report, which states:

“The DCA will continue to work to equip public authorities to build a human rights culture within their organisations.”?

How does her Department expect to do that and what will she do to help public authorities to become better equipped to deal with such issues?

If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I shall come to that in due course; it is one of the themes of my speech.

Over-zealous interpretation of the Act does not, of course, invalidate its contents. I believe that that is part of the hon. and learned Lady’s theme. May I put it to her that, as I understand it, it has long been and it remains the case in balancing different rights that the police, for example, are entitled to retain information and, where they judge it to be appropriate, to disclose it if it relates to someone who works in a sector that affects children, even if the individual in question has not been convicted? I think that that is right and nothing in the Human Rights Act prevents the continuation of that discretion on the part of the police.

Although I cannot call the relevant section to mind, I am sure that the hon. Gentleman is correct. There would be nothing to stop such a disclosure if it were in the wider public interest, in the interest of protecting against crime or in the interest of protecting good order.

Common sense is one of my themes tonight. I have pointed to the lack of common sense in the Derbyshire police case and the KFC case. Given that human rights are the values that we have all shared for a long time and that we all expect each other to share now, it would be surprising if, when used properly, they did not produce an outcome that we recognised as common sense. That, it seems to me, is a good test: if the outcome does not, when examined, appropriately accord with common sense, it is probably a case in which human rights have not been applied properly.

I thank the hon. and learned Lady for being so generous in giving way. She has given a number of examples in which people who perhaps should have known better have over-applied what they imagined to be the provisions of the Act, but does she not accept that many verdicts handed down in court have also seemed to fly in the face of common sense? I think particularly of people involved in restraining others who have trespassed on their property, who are then pursued into court and sometimes convicted of assault on the trespassers; or of people who had no right to be in this country in the first place and who have launched attacks on and committed crimes in this country, but who cannot be excluded from the country for fear of their human rights being abused if they are sent to another country. It does not all come down to misinterpretation, does it?

There was a heady mixture—[Interruption.] Yes, a dolly mixture of cases. It is difficult to unravel them to answer specifically on each. I cannot see the human rights implication in the first scenario—that of someone assaulting another person to stop a burglary—although there would be issues of appropriate defence of self and of property, which is a common law defence that has been around for a very long time. As for not deporting someone because of a danger to them, if there is an acute danger of a person being killed, I should have thought that even prior to the Human Rights Act being passed we would have been as reluctant as we are now to deport that individual. It is to some extent a question of balance, but the right to life is absolute and I do not shrink from saying that it ought to be.

Let me give a more difficult example than those that I have given so far: the case surrounding the tragic murder of Naomi Bryant. It is a sobering example of the difficulties in striking a balance between the rights of the individual and the protection of the wider community. Anthony Rice was released from a life sentence and murdered Naomi Bryant nine months later. The Parole Board and the probation service were concerned about human rights legal action against them because he had served more than the 10-year minimum term fixed by the judge; consequently, they prioritised his right to liberty. However, the Human Rights Act rightly provides for a balance to be struck. There is a positive duty on the state to protect the public to safeguard the rights, such as the right to life, of the community who may be put at risk. Appropriate weight was not given to that duty on public authorities, but that is a further example in which although the Act itself was not at fault, its application was.

Human rights are not about the protection of one group in society. Classically, they are about providing a practical framework to protect all our freedoms. If our freedoms require protection, and the freedom of others must be suspended to stop crime, resist oppression or prevent terrorism, the Human Rights Act will allow that balance to be struck, and that makes sense to us all. Of course, there are bound to be cases on the edge, grey areas where there is scope for disagreement, and cases that seem to go against the grain of popular opinion. There are difficult situations, and perhaps the most difficult concern terrorism.

Recently, Eliza Manningham-Buller talked about the domestic terrorist threat. Police and security services are working at near capacity to disrupt 30 active plots; there are 200 networks, comprising 1,600 individuals known to be engaged in plotting terrorism; and there are more than 20 ongoing terror trials involving over 80 defendants. That is a sombre picture. Against that backdrop, the Government’s primary purpose of protecting the public becomes ever more imperative to attain and ever more difficult to achieve. Terrorism will ultimately be defeated by winning hearts and minds, and any counter-terrorism legislation has to be tested against the impact that it may have on any of the communities that we seek to protect. Human rights are far from being a straitjacket limiting our ability to defend ourselves; in fact, when we need to legislate, we can justify it by reference to human rights.

Human rights go beyond racial, religious or community differences and reach to the common humanity that underpins us all. However difficult it is to sustain that idea in the face of terrorism—terrorism wants to emphasise difference and to battle in a barbarian way, extinguishing human life at random to make a partisan point—we must stay with human rights. They, and the Act, are essential in identifying, defining and protecting the values that we put to the forefront of our struggle against terrorism. Liberty and security are not opposites; they are two sides of human rights. My right to life and that of any of my Muslim or Jewish friends must be secured as best it can by the state. Diminution of that right is intolerable, and limiting freedom is undesirable. We must get away from the false dichotomy, in which security and basic freedoms are in opposition. We must remember that we have probably the widest panoply of anti-discrimination law in the world, and that we have a duty to protect life.

I am glad that the hon. and learned Lady referred to a false dichotomy, because I am worried by some of the language that Ministers use. For example, the Home Secretary said:

“It cannot be right that the rights of an individual suspected terrorist be placed above the rights, life and limb of the British people…No ifs. No buts. It’s just plain wrong.”

Is he not suggesting that any legislation that adds to the protection that we enjoy, collectively, must be set against the protections that we expect people to have, such as the right to a fair trial, and to be considered innocent until proved guilty? If we try to set the one against the other in a blanket way, we run into danger.

Yes, as far as I am concerned, that is an appropriate analysis of how we should approach the issue. Of course, balancing can be a matter of opinion, and it is a good thing that we have the framework of the Human Rights Act, not only to help us and in our own views, but to help the courts to try to get it right. Take a situation that is almost impossible to manage, such as a case in which the intelligence services “know” someone to be involved in a terrorist plot. Perhaps there is evidence in a form that the criminal courts would accept, but the price to pay would be the loss of an agent’s cover, and loss of the leverage to disrupt what might end up in multiple murder. Or perhaps the evidence is not in that form, but is of a kind that might convince an independent scrutineer of the terrorist legislation that it would be justifiable to use the evidence to detain somebody. Under the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, which was the Government’s first attempt to get the balance right in near-impossible situations of that kind, the evidence that was produced did satisfy the scrutineer, in each and every case.

However, the House of Lords found the Government’s power to detain to be unlawful. They found it discriminatory, as it was an extended immigration detention power, and so only usable against a foreigner, although there were British terrorists, too, and they found that it was therefore disproportionate in its effects on the foreign community. The same rationale was used to detain people under control orders in the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005. Those put the balancing powers of the Human Rights Act to the test, but the Act is there to be used for balance. Sometimes the courts say that the Government have got the balance right, and sometimes they say that they have got it wrong. In those extreme situations, the Government are limited in what they can do, but they have the backing of the duty to protect the public to allow them to do what we hope is enough. The Act provides a workable, desirable, demonstrably ethical framework within which hugely difficult decisions can be taken as fairly and as transparently as they can ever be.

Returning to more peaceful concerns, let me give an example of human rights at their best. In “Something for Everyone: the impact of the Human Rights Act and the need for a Human Rights Commission,” a piece of research carried out by the British Institute of Human Rights a few years ago, Emily Holzhausen from Carers UK is quoted. She says, speaking of the time before the Act:

“Sometimes you have a situation where a disabled person doesn’t want any help, and wants the person who’s caring for them to do everything. The person who cares does round the clock care, incontinence, all those kinds of things. In terms of the balance of one individual against the other, if you discard the Human Rights Act, the law at present favours the disabled person’s rights over the carer’s rights. But the Human Rights Act actually addresses that. It is an enormously difficult and complex situation, and at some point there needs to be a compromise of rights. So that’s where the Human Rights Act is useful.”

With its concept of balancing rights, the Human Rights Act is an ideal tool to use. It does not negate the essential humanity of any participant in a situation, but it helps to ensure that one person’s rights and freedoms do not override another’s so completely that there is little left of the second person’s rights, or little respect for their dignity. That is how we want human rights to be used in public services—to frame thinking, and to guide judgments that result in fairness to all parties, so that the outcome is common sense. That might not be so readily achievable without a framework of rights for us to reason through.

To make all those points clearer, last week the Lord Chancellor launched a campaign, “Human Rights: Common Values, Common Sense”. It will take two forms. First, Ministers will make the point that human rights are our values and are common sense. Today’s debate is part of that, in case anyone had not guessed. Misapplication of our rights, so that they appear not to accord with our values and common sense, is a recipe for ensuring that faith in them declines, and ensuring that their value to the public is weakened. That will put those rights under threat, and where that has happened—I detailed some examples—the people involved are hard-pressed front-line officials who have tried to do a proper job. It is our Department’s job to make sure that people who have to apply, interpret and implement human rights law are fully equipped to do the job. We have partly done that, including by making available a toolkit to help people operate the legislation properly, but clearly we have not done enough.

The second element of the campaign will be a concerted programme of reaching out to key services—to the police, local government, the health service and a multitude of others—to offer people as much help and support as we can when they face those difficult problems, and to offer them advice on how to come up with common-sense solutions based on human rights. My noble Friend Lord Falconer recently met the leaders of the Association of Chief Police Officers, and we are grateful for their early support. We intend to hold such meetings with many other, similar bodies.

To move forward, we argue that although the Human Rights Act incorporated the European convention on human rights into UK law for the first time, those rights are deeply and profoundly British. They are there to protect the public, not to put people at risk. They are there to benefit the majority, not just minorities. Human rights are for the many, not just the few. As Lord Falconer characterised it, the campaign is about moving from nonsense to common sense—a short phrase but a big step, and a step that we are determined to take.

First, I ought to declare my interest as a qualified barrister who practised for about 10 years. I welcome the debate, which the Lord Chancellor flagged up in a speech on human rights at Manchester university on 9 February:

“We will take the campaign to Parliament with a fully fledged debate on the Floor of the House.”

He will be disappointed by the number of Labour Members who have come to the House this evening to play a part in that debate. I am glad, however, that there are more Opposition Members than Government Members in the Chamber.

I welcome this debate on a very important subject indeed. The first duty of any Government is to protect the country’s security, but that has become an ever more demanding challenge. The rise of international terrorism, the mass movement of people and the transformation of communications technology, which makes it much easier for terrorists to plan and co-ordinate their campaigns, make it far harder for Governments to protect their citizens. In the west, the phenomenon of the suicide bomber is relatively recent—in the middle east, of course, it is nothing new—and such individuals are prepared to kill vast numbers of innocent people using whatever weapons they can lay their hands on. Thwarting the terrorist threat is an awesome responsibility, but it is the first duty of any Government.

The other great challenge is to protect people’s liberties and human rights; otherwise democracy and freedom will be undermined. To balance those two responsibilities, compromise or a trade-off are required. For example, advances in computer science, information storage and satellite monitoring systems make it easier than ever before for powerful Government Departments and agencies, whether public or private, to keep tabs on citizens and other people. Our citizens must therefore deal with an expanding array of increasingly complex bureaucracies that intrude into their lives on a scale and in a manner that previous generations would never have accepted or agreed to. The Opposition accept that the fight against terrorism inevitably means that the state must take new powers of surveillance and enforcement. We accept that the relationship between individual citizens and the powerful institutions of the state must change in response to changing circumstances, but it remains a vital requirement that any free and democratic society should go out of its way to protect those basic rights and liberties. Indeed, a free society is the best protection against terrorism and crime.

As for the Government’s response, they have been hyperactive since 1997, and 54 criminal justice Bills have been introduced. The Minister admitted in exchanges with me in a recent Adjournment debate in Westminster Hall that 3,000 new criminal offences have been added to the statute book. We support many of those new laws, but unfortunately much of the Government’s legislation has undermined human rights, as it is authoritarian and ineffective. There was an ill-judged attempt by Her Majesty’s Government to criminalise religious hatred, and we are highly sceptical of some of the new powers in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. We oppose the Government’s attempt to undermine the right to trial by jury, and we oppose, too, the more draconian powers in the Civil Contingencies Act 2004. We oppose the 90-day detention limit, and we strongly oppose the plans of Her Majesty’s Government for identity cards.

In addition, we have become a society in which Big Brother watches our every move. For example, only last week, Home Office Ministers agreed at an EU Council of Ministers meeting that police across Europe should be given free access to Britain’s DNA, fingerprint and car registration databases. In due course, there will probably be a Euro-wide database, but the UK has by far the largest criminal DNA database in the world. Indeed, it is 50 times the size of the French equivalent. It has 4.2 million registrations, and that number is increasing by 0.5 million a year. The Home Secretary cannot even ensure the proper registration of criminal convictions of British nationals in the EU, so why is he pressing ahead with a scheme without any guarantees or safeguards in place?

I am glad that the hon. Gentleman made that point, because many of us are enormously concerned that the British DNA database does not consist only of data collected from convicted criminals, or even data collected from people who have been charged with an offence. It contains data from people who have been arrested, but who may not have been charged or who have appeared in court and have been found not guilty. That information is being put into the European system without any sanction by Parliament or, indeed, the European Parliament.

The hon. Gentleman is spot on, as he is on so many occasions. Our database is the biggest in the world, with 50 times as many registrations as the French database, because we have defined it that way.

I wish to examine the context in which the Human Rights Act operates. The answer to the question of whether it helps to protect our citizens from ill-thought-out authoritarian legislation is manifestly “no”. As for the question of whether it acts as a restraining influence on the Government’s illiberal tendencies, I submit that it certainly does not do so. Of course, the Act has resulted in some positive outcomes, including those mentioned by the Minister. I would add the decision whereby the right of an elderly married couple not to be kept apart in separate care homes was upheld. However, that is common sense, and it should never have been a problem in the first place. We welcome the right of families of the deceased to be represented at coroners’ inquests. The Human Rights Act has had positive outcomes, but does it help or hinder the fight against crime and terrorism? Does it help to bring criminals and terrorists to justice? Unfortunately, in our judgment, the answer is “no”. The Assets Recovery Agency, for example, was forced to spend millions of pounds fighting legal challenges brought by criminals under the Human Rights Act, thus ensuring that many cases are bogged down for years. The backlog in the courts has grown, with 146 incomplete claims. The agency’s director has directly blamed the human rights “bandwagon” for thwarting efforts to recover assets.

Does that not illustrate the point that I was trying to make earlier? It is all well and good for Ministers to prate about applying common sense, but in the courts judges have to apply and interpret the law. Applying and interpreting the law and applying common sense are often two very different things.

My hon. Friend is spot on. It is not just a question of applying the law but of the impact of the Act on the police and many other practitioners in the legal and justice system. It has created a risk-averse culture, which has had many unintended consequences.

The Anthony Rice case was mentioned by the Minister, and it is a good example of the unintended and often perverse consequences of the Human Rights Act. Anthony Rice was wrongly released on licence and went on, as the Minister pointed out, to commit the tragic murder of Naomi Bryant. The Bridges report that investigated the case made it quite clear that a factor that influenced officials who dealt with Rice was the concern that he might sue them under the Human Rights Act. Officials and organisations are therefore constantly looking over their shoulder. [Interruption.] Indeed, they are wrong to do so, but that culture has become part of the way in which those organisations operate.

Recently, police have tried to recapture foreign ex-prisoners who should have been deported but who went on the run instead. The obvious thing to do would be to issue “Wanted” posters, but police forces across the country refused to do so on the grounds that it would breach the Human Rights Act. However many missives, directives and items of guidance the Lord Chancellor sends out, in many forces and other organisations there is a risk-averse culture that cannot be changed overnight.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Of course I will give way to the Chairman of the Joint Committee on Human Rights.

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. The issue is one that we have just explored in correspondence with the Association of Chief Police Officers. I had a letter back from ACPO only today making it clear that there is no reason at all, from the human rights point of view, why “Wanted” posters of people who are convicted escaped felons should not be published. There is a difference between such people and suspects who have not been convicted of any offence. That has been made clear by the Derbyshire police in the case to which my hon. and learned Friend referred earlier, and more generally.

I am glad to hear that. It is good news, but the hon. Gentleman would no doubt accept that it will take more than one or two statements from ACPO to change the culture that has built up.

Let us consider the deportation of undesirable aliens who threaten our security, a point that was made in an intervention by my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis). Surely common sense dictates that we should be able to remove from this country those who want to do harm to this country and our citizens. We are a compassionate, understanding nation. Of course we will not send people back to countries where they will be persecuted or tortured.

Over the past few years we have sent many young British soldiers to fight in wars in countries as diverse as Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Iraq and Afghanistan. Many soldiers have lost their lives and we have spent a vast amount of money fighting those wars. As a result, we have brought a great degree of peace and stability to those countries, yet there are many people from those countries who claimed asylum in Britain and were allowed to stay here so long as there were serious problems and unrest in their own country representing a threat to them. Now that we have imposed democratic regimes in many of those countries, surely that argument falls apart. I am not suggesting for one moment that we should have a blanket policy of deporting anyone anywhere in the world. Of course we would not do that.

Let us look at the case of the nine Afghans who hijacked the Boeing 727 in February 2000, which received a huge amount of coverage at the time. The Home Secretary said:

“I continue to believe that those whose actions have undermined any legitimate claim to asylum should not be granted leave to remain in the UK. I plan to bring forward legislation to do this as part of the early Bill to strengthen our immigration laws.”

He went on to say that the serious crimes that the hijackers had committed were incompatible with refugee status. I hope we all agree with those sentiments, but has there been any action? No, because the Home Secretary knows that his plans are contrary to the human rights legislation. The Home Office should admit that.

One of the cases that has had an impact on what the Home Secretary could do and what the court had to decide in that case was the Chahal case in the European Court of Human Rights in 1996, with which colleagues are probably familiar. The case has had a number of consequences. For example, in the Singh and Singh case in 2000, the Home Secretary at the time decided that although those two men had committed no crime under British law, they were nevertheless a serious threat to our security; but a British judge, guided by the Human Rights Act and its requirement to use ECHR jurisprudence—that is, the Chahal case—as a precedent, ruled that the Home Secretary could not make that judgment.

The Special Immigration Appeals Commission was not happy about having to follow the ECHR jurisprudence. When giving judgment Mr. Justice Potts, a man who is not known for his authoritarian views and who is one of the more compassionate judges on the Bench, said that

“law abiding citizens of the United Kingdom might reasonably feel disquiet about a state of affairs which permits international terrorists proved to be a danger to the national security to remain here”.

He could not have put it better.

The hon. Gentleman seems to conflate two different issues, the Chahal case and the Afghan hijackers. Has he read our report dealing with the Afghan hijackers, which makes it clear that the decisions of the court were based on findings of fact—bearing in mind the point that the hon. Gentleman made earlier about not sending people back to be killed—that the hijackers would be targeted for assassination by the Taliban, and also the finding of fact, which was not challenged by the Home Office, that they presented no risk whatever to security in the United Kingdom?

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. He is extremely knowledgeable. I have seen the report and I will look at it in more detail. However, the point is not whether the Home Secretary would finally have decided to send the hijackers back. If he had made a judgment that they would be tortured, imprisoned and killed, that would have been a different matter, but he had no right to send them back, and he had no chance of exercising his judgment. That is why the present law is flawed.

Does my hon. Friend agree that despite the weasel words that we have heard with respect to the hijackers and the ECHR, the judge ultimately made the decision on the question of lawfulness in relation to discretionary leave under the ECHR, so the ECHR was indeed the basis for the decision?

There is no question about that. In our judgment, it was the wrong decision, but even if the Home Secretary, on advice from the embassy in Afghanistan, from the United Nations and from bodies such as Amnesty International, that the hijackers would be put at serious risk and would almost certainly be tortured and killed, and being a compassionate and understanding person, had been inclined not to send them back, he would not have that choice because the law is such that we are bound by the decision of the European Court of Human Rights.

The hon. Gentleman is being patient. I want to understand his position. If he accepts that the judgment made in a British court was based on the European convention on human rights, does he believe that a different judgment would have been arrived at by a court in Strasbourg? If he believes that the judgment would be different, can he explain why? If he believes that it would be the same, how is the Human Rights Act in any way implicit in the decision that was reached about the legality of the position?

I take on board the point that the hon. Gentleman makes. Our view, and that of my colleague, the leader of the Conservative party, is that the constraints placed on our courts and our Ministers should not be placed on them. Those constraints result from the Chahal case and are reinforced by the Human Rights Act.

I shall move on to the case of the Belmarsh detainees. There was no admissible evidence that those individuals, all foreign nationals, had committed a crime under British law for which they could be prosecuted. However, the Home Office made it clear that there was sufficient intelligence material relating to the danger that they posed to our security that a judge was persuaded, under the auspices of the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, to detain them. Obviously, there was a strong case for deportation, but because of the Human Rights Act and the nature of our participation in the ECHR, that was not possible. In response to the case of the Belmarsh detainees, what did the Government do? They opted for an illiberal solution—control orders. This is an example of the Human Rights Act undermining existing legislation and of the Government going for an illiberal, draconian solution.

There are many other examples of the Human Rights Act hindering the normal enforcement of law and hampering the punishment of criminals. The Minister mentioned the Barry Chambers case. He was the individual who went up on the roof and was brought Kentucky Fried Chicken and other food because if the police had not done so, in their view, they would not have been satisfying his human rights. The Minister may say that that was a stupid case where common sense was not applied, but it is an example of how police forces throughout the country feel that they have one hand tied behind their back because of the risk-averse culture and the need to focus in one direction, rather than concentrating on their job, sorting out law and order in this country and getting tough on criminals.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

I shall carry on a little longer.

The case of the paedophile at the gym occurred towards the end of last year, when a convicted paedophile was using a gym at a leisure centre that was also used by schoolchildren. The man had been convicted of sexually abusing a number of girls aged between 12 and 14, but the solicitors acting for the school and the local council said that a ban would not be practicable because it might infringe his human rights. That was another case of an organisation—a local authority—adopting a risk-averse approach.

Only the other day, we had the case of the Babamuboni brothers, who were part of a gang that set out to rob guests at a christening party in Peckham in 2005. There was a certain amount of doubt over age, forged passports were involved, and all sorts of questions were raised as to how old they were, which was particularly vital because the way in which they could be sentenced depended on it. The police suggested that dental checks should be carried out on the two brothers, and we understand that those tests would have been accurate to within two or three months. However, the police took the view that under the Human Rights Act they were unable to force the brothers to undergo those tests.

The Minister may say that those are all one-off, ridiculous cases and that they are absurd. However, not only has the HRA singularly failed to protect our citizens from the long arm and vagaries of an authoritarian and illiberal Government, it is hampering existing legislation. It has instilled in the police, the Prison Service, the probation service and many other public bodies throughout the country a risk-averse culture that ignores common sense.

By giving new rights to terrorists and criminals, the Act has undermined and neutered some of our key existing laws. Her Majesty’s Government have responded by bringing in ever more draconian legislation. Is not it ironic that the very Act that was designed to empower citizens with new rights is becoming one of the key drivers of illiberal and authoritarian law making? Not only is it hampering the fight against crime and terrorism, but it has helped to create a culture of rights without responsibilities—that is why we need a new approach.

I feel very strongly that we need to follow the example of some other European Union countries, which have found a way of protecting their vital interests, but with reservations. France has a specific exemption for its armed forces and police. In Germany, there is a clearly codified constitutional document called the basic law that protects Germany’s vital national interests. The European Court and the European Court of Human Rights can defer to any clearly defined domestic constitutional doctrine through what is called the margin of appreciation. We need to take advantage of that. The only answer is to repeal the Human Rights Act and consider introducing a new, modern Bill of Rights that can balance rights with responsibilities.

How would that change the situation? The omission of a right from the new Bill of Rights that he proposes would in no way preclude someone taking legal action in the European Court of Human Rights because we remain subscribers to the convention—or is he suggesting that we withdraw from the convention entirely?

I am not necessarily suggesting that we withdraw from the convention, because if we can make the Bill of Rights work, as I explained earlier, we would have a situation in which the European Court of Human Rights would have to defer to a clearly defined, domestic constitutional doctrine. That would mean that the margin of appreciation would work. We are taking legal advice on the matter by talking to some of the top human rights lawyers in the country. If they conclude that a bill of rights is workable and would give Britain a status similar to the German basic law, it would restore British parliamentary supremacy over European law, which many people feel very strongly about. As far as the margin of appreciation is concerned, that would apply to our vital national interests.

What is going to be in the Bill of Rights?

The Bill of Rights would be very simple. It would define those core values that give us identity as a free nation. It would spell out the fundamental duties and responsibilities of people living in this country—duties as well as rights—and it would guide the judiciary and the Government in applying human rights law when the lack of responsibility of some individuals threatens the rights of others. It would enshrine and protect fundamental liberties. It would make that process quite clear. We would have far greater clarity and precision, which would allow those rights to be enforced more easily and effectively in circumstances where they ought to be protected, but it would be harder to extend them inappropriately, as happens under the present law. We need greater clarity and precision and we do not have that at the moment.

rose—

rose—

I will give way to my hon. Friend.

Does my hon. Friend agree that there is absolutely nothing curious or strange about the idea that we as elected representatives in this House of Commons can, as we have for centuries, make decisions about where the balance is to lie in respect of matters such as human rights? The basis on which he is putting his case is the basis on which we should go forward. We should decide; it should not be decided by some prattling universal declaration.

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The Bill of Rights would re-invoke the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy over EU law and the European Court of Human Rights. If we can make it work, we most certainly will.

I shall bring my remarks to a conclusion because many hon. Members want to speak in the debate. The Government admit that there are flaws in the Human Rights Act. The Lord Chancellor is touring the country telling anyone who is prepared to listen that an injection of common sense will make it work properly. However, in the two speeches that he recently made, there were no answers to the fundamental flaws in the Act. I ask the Lord Chancellor and the Minister: why do they go on defending an Act that is beyond repair and not fit for purpose?

Incidentally, if Ministers spent less time trying to defend the legislation, they might be able to sort out the problems in their own Department, such as the crisis of legal aid, which impacts on all our constituents. Why cannot Department for Constitutional Affairs Ministers work with Home Office Ministers?

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

No, I am bringing my remarks to a conclusion. Why not help to find solutions to the gun crime crisis in this country? The number of gun crimes has doubled since 1997. Last year, 645 people were robbed at gunpoint in their own homes. Let us protect the rights of—

Order. I think the hon. Gentleman is going a little bit wide of the matter before the House.

My point is that those people are victims. They have rights as well. Surely we should do two things: reinforce and reimpose parliamentary democracy as supreme over European law; and spend more time trying to protect the rights of people who are victims of crime and really need their rights protected, and less time worrying about the rights of terrorists and criminals, which this law obliges us to do, day in and day out. I suggest that the Minister follow our advice. The Act is not fit for purpose. Why does she not admit that and join us in repealing it?

Several hon. Members rose—

Order. I must remind the House that Mr. Speaker has placed a 12-minute limit on Back-Bench speeches that operates from now.

As the Chairman of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, I welcome this long overdue debate. I hope that we shall hear some rather more informed and accurate contributions from the Opposition than the one we just heard.

We must and can show that the Human Rights Act is not just about minorities or criminals and terrorists. We must and can clearly demonstrate that it provides essential rights for the elderly, children, those with physical or mental illness and disability, the homeless, and every single citizen—each one of us—in our dealings with the state in all its forms. It must not simply be a lawyers’ gravy train. It must mainstream decency and fair play throughout our public services.

Recently, the Joint Committee produced a report on the odious crime of people trafficking, highlighting HRA duties to protect the victims of this modern-day slave trade. The Government responded positively by accepting our recommendation that we should sign up to the European convention against this crime. We are about to embark on an inquiry into the treatment of the elderly in hospitals and care homes, and their access to what can be expensive treatments, and I expect that that will be seen to be a popular cause. However, I make no apologies for the fact that we are also prepared to stand up for less popular, often demonised, groups who do not have the ear of the media or general public sympathy. A case in point is our current inquiry into the treatment of asylum seekers—not who is or is not one, but how the system treats them.

The Government have consistently referred to the need to entrench human rights as a package of shared values, with rights tempered by the responsibilities we have to each other and to the wider community. Those rights themselves are not alien to the United Kingdom, nor were they imposed by some distant European body. In fact, the convention was in large part drafted by the British, based on our ancient, traditional, basic rights and values. Respect for those rights and everything that goes with them should help to change the way in which people think and behave, creating an atmosphere in which decisions and policies are discussed and understood.

The basic aim of the Human Rights Act was to bring rights home, so that British residents did not face a long and expensive journey to Strasbourg to ensure that they are enforced, which would be the consequence of the policy advanced by the Opposition. Clear examples can be given of how the Act has benefited individuals who would have had no redress at home without it. We have already heard about the local authority that wanted to separate a couple who had been married for decades by putting them in separate care homes when they could not look after themselves. Action under the Human Rights Act prevented that. The adult children of an elderly woman who was fed her breakfast while sitting on a commode used the Human Rights Act to argue that that was against her human rights, and stopped the mistreatment.

The hon. Gentleman says very assuredly that action under the Human Rights Act prevented or stopped those abuses. Does he not think that perhaps the benefits of a free press and the public outrage that those abuses generated had rather more to do with those bureaucracies changing their opinion?

Trial by media does not create rights that people can go to court to enforce, and that is exactly what happened in the cases to which I referred. The media had not achieved that objective. An example is the case of the older people living in local authority residential care homes who secured much better protection against home closures, which involve risks to people’s life, health, dignity and psychological well-being. Disabled people who had difficulty accessing care services because of restrictive manual handling policies have benefited from a judicial reinterpretation of the manual handling regulations to make them human rights compatible. Council tenants established a duty for local authority landlords to maintain their homes in decent condition, so that councils did not let properties that were unfit for human habitation. A disabled council tenant successfully used the Act to establish that a local authority had a positive obligation to enable her to lead as normal a life as possible by providing the specially adapted accommodation that she was assessed as needing, but which it had denied her.

Will the hon. Gentleman tell us which law he is referring to that could not be covered by legislation at Westminster on Westminster terms?

If we were to try to produce a piece of legislation to deal with each and every one of those cases, we would never be able to plug all the gaps—which is what the Human Rights Act does, in bringing the European convention home to the United Kingdom.

As things stand, however, the protections of the Human Rights Act in such cases are being whittled away because of the courts’ interpretation of what is a public authority. Privatisation and contracting out are undermining the safety net provided by the Act for the most vulnerable people, such as the elderly and the disabled. When I put that to my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister at the Liaison Committee, he said:

“I think that anyone who is providing a public service is clearly subject to the same rules...The way to deal with it is to make sure that public and private sector bodies are treated the same when they are providing a public service”.

I agree. That is a key issue for the future of the Human Rights Act—an issue on which the Joint Committee on Human Rights will report in the future, and on which I introduced a ten-minute Bill—the Human Rights Act 1998 (Meaning of Public Authority) Bill.

The Government’s commitment to the rights and values protected by the Human Rights Act has increasingly been challenged by high-profile, but usually ill-informed, press reporting of maladministration, wrongly attributed to the Human Rights Act, by statements from senior Ministers and, as we have heard tonight, by statements from Opposition Front Benchers.

In May 2006, the Prime Minister asked the Department for Constitutional Affairs and the Home Office to conduct reviews of the impact of the HRA. The Joint Committee on Human Rights broadly welcomed the conclusion of those reviews. We reiterated our concern that one of the greatest challenges to human rights in the UK was the need to engage the public imagination and embed a human rights culture among ordinary people, not simply within public authorities, the House or lawyers’ chambers—not that that has yet been achieved in any event. By a culture of human rights, we mean not the neglect of duties and responsibilities, but a climate in which respect for those rights becomes an integral part of our way of life, a reference point for our dealings with public authorities and one another.

Such a culture cannot be achieved through litigation alone. It demands that decision makers understand human rights law correctly, and integrate into their policy and decision-making processes those real expectations—not the myths and not the excuses of politically correct jobsworths, who use bizarre misinterpretations as lame and bogus explanations—to ensure that the traditional British sense of decency and fair play, enshrined in the Act, is reflected in the way they work. A good example of that is the Kentucky Fried Chicken case, about which we have heard, and in which what was probably an unpopular and difficult decision to feed someone on a roof during a siege was somehow justified using the Human Rights Act, when the decision probably made common sense in the negotiations to get the man down safely. It had absolutely nothing to do with the Human Rights Act at all.

However, damaging myths about human rights have taken root in the popular imagination. The JCHR examined in close detail three cases that led to calls for the amendment or repeal of the Human Rights Act. The first case was that of the Afghani hijackers, who were never convicted of an offence in the UK; their conviction was overturned on appeal. The second case was the deportation of foreign prisoners. That issue arises out of the European Court of Human Rights, as has correctly been said, and I suspect that we would come to the same conclusion, in relation to individual cases, across the House. The third case involved the management of Anthony Rice by the probation service. In respect of each of those cases, assertions were made by senior Ministers that the Human Rights Act, or the judges or officials interpreting it, were responsible for the unpopular events that took place. In each case, those assertions attributing the outcome to the Human Rights Act were unfounded, and in the report the Committee gives a full analysis of why that is the case.

We welcome the Government’s new commitment to human rights myth busting and raising public confidence in the Human Rights Act, but public misunderstandings are likely to continue so long as very senior Ministers fail to retract inaccurate comments already made or make further unfounded assertions about the Act, or it is used as a scapegoat for administrative failings. We have already heard about the high-profile case in which a police authority refused to publish photographs of convicted prisoners on the run, as it wrongly considered that publication would breach the escaped convicts’ right to privacy. The Association of Chief Police Officers has confirmed to me that nothing in the Human Rights Act would prevent such publication in the interests of public safety. There may occasionally be operational reasons why photographs should not be published—for example, if they are out of date—or there may be other reasons, to do with a surveillance operation, but nothing in the Human Rights Act leads to that conclusion. It issues guidance only in respect of people who have not been convicted of any offence who may be suspects.

The Lord Chancellor’s speech on 9 February made him the chief myth buster, dispelling what he called the “clouds of nonsense”. He was entirely correct to entitle his speech “Human rights and common sense”. Ministries must be encouraged to take prompt action to prevent the development of Human Rights Act-based myths or scapegoating within their own areas of responsibility, which has happened.

The recent Department for Constitutional Affairs review ruled out withdrawing from the European convention on human rights or repealing the Human Rights Act. It did not, however, rule out the possibility of amending the Human Rights Act in future. The Lord Chancellor told us that the value of an amendment would be to send a “message” to officials or public authorities, rather than to change the meaning or effect of the convention.

In the JCHR’s view, it is wrong to use legislation, and parliamentary time, to send messages about the law. That can be done through guidance and instructions to Departments. Amending the Act to enshrine a duty to protect would not add anything to the existing obligation to protect the right to life. Indeed, our summer report on counter-terrorism re-emphasised the duty of the state to protect its citizens from terrorism. We proposed a series of Human Rights Act-compliant reforms to the criminal justice system to that effect—for example, in relation to the use of intercept evidence in court, a matter that I understand is under detailed consideration and on which I hope that we will have a sensible answer.

I am also referring to the need to allow the police to interview post-charge terrorist suspects and to allow adverse inferences to be drawn from a failure to co-operate, and to more judicial control over the detention processes. We came to the conclusion that it was not necessary to extend the pre-trial detention period—a view that I think is shared by the Opposition and which is supported, contrary to what we heard earlier, by requirements under the Human Rights Act. This also applies to concerns about the operation of control orders. Again, I understand that the control orders regime was opposed by the official Opposition in terms of the Human Rights Act.

In contrast with the Department for Constitutional Affairs review, which provided a lengthy analysis to support its conclusions, the Home Office review has never been published. That review suggested that there was a “culture of risk aversion”. The Government said that they were addressing that, but failed to provide any evidence of a culture of risk aversion having resulted from the Human Rights Act in the first place. Without proper open scrutiny of the Home Office review, there is a real risk that the implications of that so-called culture may be overblown or misreported, as we have heard from the Opposition tonight. I suggest that in her closing remarks my hon. and learned Friend the Minister might like to tell us why the Government will not publish the review. That said, we welcome the fact that the Government did not assert that there was an imbalance in the criminal justice system that prioritised the rights of offenders over victims.

The establishment of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights this year will give rise to a new impetus for the development of a positive culture of human rights in the UK. However, there is clearly much work to be done in the meantime. The commission will need time to find its feet. In the meantime, the Government must ensure that Ministers and public authorities do not cut across the benefits of the Act or undermine them by making ill-informed statements, which should be withdrawn when it is pointed out that they are plain wrong. Myths must still be busted, and it may be Ministers, not just the Lord Chancellor, who are in the best position to do that effectively. I am pleased that we have started to witness more of that activity recently. For example, on the lunchtime news, the Lord Chancellor quickly came to the case involving the Derbyshire police, saying that there was no reason under the Human Rights Act why those photographs should not be published.

The Human Rights Committee will continue to work with the Commission for Equality and Human Rights to monitor and research the extent to which the Act has an impact on policy making and on the lives of ordinary people, not just by scrutinising Bills for their Human Rights Act compliance, but in a more positive way: by looking at Government policy statements to see whether they are genuinely Human Rights Act compliant, and by pointing out failures not just in legislation but in delivery of services. That is where the real battle should be fought—not over black letter law, but over ensuring that human rights are mainstreamed throughout our public services and, where services are not delivered, appropriately pointing that out.

In all this, the hon. Gentleman has not introduced any democratic balance. He is talking about social issues, which are the heart of the political debate in this country, but he does not say that there is a democratic right sometimes to determine what is the appropriate allocation of priorities to major issues of public policy.

The hon. Gentleman is entirely right, but there are basic fundamental freedoms enshrined in the Act. I hope that none of the examples that I have given today are ones that he would have disagreed with had he been asked to make that decision himself.

I hope that the Government will continue to work to support the Human Rights Act in an active campaigning way, to ensure that the Act is properly enshrined in our society.

It is a pleasure to follow the Chairman of the Joint Committee on Human Rights. I would have said that this was a timely debate, except that I fear that the time for it was possibly five or six years ago—it should have been held annually since—in order to counter some of the mythology that has, unfortunately, grown around the Human Rights Act. I congratulate the Lord Chancellor and the hon. and learned Lady on what they are doing. I do not say this often, but even the Attorney-General is encompassed in that big tent of praise for addressing some of the arguments that should be put forcefully about the value of the Act.

It is an enormously valuable Act. In fact, I think it is the most important Act that the Labour Government have put through. It enshrines the foundations of a civilised society, which is important. It provides for the defence not of the criminal, but of the citizen against the state. That is important. It allows attacks on those rights that we have as citizens of this country to be remedied within a British court, rather than a court in Strasbourg and that is right and proper as well. That is why I find it difficult to understand some of the arguments that have been advanced against the Act.

The mythology surrounding the Act has built up over the past six years. Newspapers, many of which should know better, have promulgated basic untruths about the implications of the Act. The culmination was when one tabloid newspaper last year proudly announced that it was leading a campaign, not against the Human Rights Act, but against human rights. To use the tabloid phrase, you could not make it up. I thought that this country was very proud of standing up for human rights and the rights of the citizen, yet a major British newspaper was campaigning against human rights.

I am sorry to say this, particularly to the hon. Member for North-West Norfolk (Mr. Bellingham), but those newspapers have been aided and abetted by the Conservative party. In the past few years, I have often joined in trying to defend the rights of the citizen against the Government in terms of civil liberties and human rights. Often, in arguing against what the Government have proposed, I have quoted from these Benches the articles of the European convention on human rights and heard that argument echoed by Conservative Front-Bench spokesmen, yet the Conservative party, for opportunistic and badly informed reasons, has decided that there is something to be gained by portraying the Human Rights Act as being inimical to human rights in this country—I do not believe that it is—and as something that it wishes to get rid of.

I think that the hon. Gentleman was party to the proposal in the Prevention of Terrorism Bill relating to control orders, which we put through in the middle of the night, and that he insisted that the Human Rights Act be ring-fenced in that legislation. Is he able to explain why it is that, in relation to those control orders, the Act clearly has not worked? Does not he agree that it is essential that we legislate on our own terms to ensure fair trial, due process and habeas corpus, all of which we can do to ensure that alleged suspects get a fair deal?

I think that it is important that we legislate in the House to ensure the rights of the citizen. I do not see any contradiction between that and the provisions of the convention on human rights. On the specific point that the hon. Gentleman raises about control orders, had the Government taken our advice on the matter of control orders, they would not have found themselves in legal difficulties in implementing them, but they chose not to do so. They chose not to put in the safeguards that we demanded. The inevitable result was that the Human Rights Act did its job in requiring the Government to think again. That is a good illustration of the Act doing its job effectively.

The hon. Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) made the point well that the last element that has helped to whip up that campaign has been senior Ministers in the Government—not the Lord Chancellor, not the Attorney-General, not the hon. and learned Lady, but a succession of Home Secretaries and the Prime Minister, who have lost no opportunity to rubbish the effects of their own legislation and to rubbish the decisions of judges made on the basis of that legislation. When shown to be wrong, as they have been, they have not made any effort to retract their statements. That is deplorable.

Why do we have that campaign against the Human Rights Act? One reason is the allergy to the word “European”. The fact that the name of the convention is the European convention on human rights leads some who are ill informed to assume that it is the spawn of the European devil: the European Union. It is not of course, as has been made clear in the debate. If anything, it was the creation of the British Government and the British judiciary after the war, very much supported by Sir Winston Churchill at the time, although perhaps not by Attlee. Of course, the spirit of Churchill is now dormant within the Conservative party. That is one element in the concern about the current Conservative attitude.

There is confusion as to what the Act says. Very few people understand that it creates no new rights and that all it does is change the area of justiciability of those rights to a British court. That is something that British people should be very pleased about. They will save money, and find it easier to put their case to a British court than to go to a court in Strasbourg. Incidentally, a court in Strasbourg may have much less well defined sensibilities about British culture and British justice than a court here, yet there is a misunderstanding about that.

Concern was expressed immediately after the passing of the Act that, because of the publicity attendant on its passing, there would be a huge appetite for litigation. I am sure that all hon. Members will have heard people in their surgeries who, when dismayed about some petty decision by a bureaucracy in their constituencies, say, “I know my human rights. I am going to get this under the Human Rights Act.” They are almost always wrong because there is no requirement under the Human Rights Act that the lamp post outside their window should be moved 3 ft down the road, that the pothole be filled or all the other things done that they tell us about. They tell us, however, that what they want is a human right, that it is justiciable and that they will get a remedy in court.

The reality is that the number of cases being brought under the terms of the Act is reducing markedly; there has been a 27 per cent. fall from the peak according to the most recent records, and barristers estimate that in only 5 per cent. of all cases is there any Human Rights Act implication at all in the judge’s judgment.

There are also failings of reporting—of the British media. Often a headline will be splashed across the front page about someone who is going to court because their human rights have been infringed in some way, but what is never reported is the fact that the case was laughed out of court and the person who brought it ended up out of pocket for putting such a prosperous proposition that his human rights had been in any way curtailed.

There are also stories that are just plain wrong. We have already heard play from Members in all parts of the House about the incident on the roof in Gloucester—about the poor and much-quoted criminal on the roof. Let me say something drawn from my experience. I was for a while a chairman of a police authority and I was very much involved in policing policy in the Avon and Somerset area. I had experience of contingency planning for hostage situations. It is standard police practice, and always has been, to make sure that the material needs of an individual in a hostage situation, or in a situation where someone might throw themselves from the top of a building, are settled so that negotiations can be continued. That has nothing to do with human rights. As the Minister said, no article of the European convention on human rights mentions Kentucky fried chicken. That is simply not there, so why do we pretend that it is?

In an intervention, the hon. Member for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis) raised an issue to do with an assault case. I am sorry to have to tell him that if someone is accused of assault, they are accused of it not under the provisions of the Human Rights Act. It might be the case that they are wrongly accused of assault—that they are preposterously accused of assault—but that would not be the fault of the Human Rights Act, so why pretend that it is?

The problem that the hon. Gentleman fails to address is that when legislation on the statute book is so systematically misinterpreted—as he would put it—by all the authorities high and low that affect people’s lives day to day in the enforcement of the law, one has to say that somebody has badly failed in educating those authorities on how to apply that legislation. Is the fact that so many people are led to misinterpret it a failure of Government or a failure of the concept of the legislation itself? I know which of the two options I think is the right answer.

It is patently not a failure of the legislation because the provisions have been in force since 1950. Therefore, it must be a failure of administration—although, I must say, aided and abetted by Members saying that a charge of assault is a result of the Human Rights Act. It is not, and the hon. Gentleman should make sure that he understands the legislation before he refers to it. That highlights a key problem.

The hon. Gentleman’s intervention has served the useful function of putting me in a position where I can move on to the half-witted bureaucrats who are a large part of the problem.

The hon. Gentleman is talking about half-witted people, but the chief superintendent in charge of the case of the guy on the roof and the deputy chief constable both said that they were concerned about infringing his human rights, so there is something very wrong about the way in which they are interpreting the existing legislation.

The hon. Gentleman might have an advantage over me, but I did not see that any senior officer was quoted as having said that in that case. I looked at what was reported very carefully; the phrase used was that mysterious form of words that often appears in newspaper articles—“a police source said”. I suspect that no senior officer involved in that case was labouring under any such illusion.

What is important is the interpretation of human rights legislation by those who—to borrow a lovely phrase that I picked up from somewhere—are a few law books short of a law library. I am referring to people who do not understand what they are talking about but who feel free to give advice to others in very difficult situations as to how they should interpret the law. That has repeatedly happened over the past few years. I find some common ground with the hon. Member for North-West Norfolk in that I think that that problem is in part to do with a litigation-averse public sector that is now so scared of being taken to court not only under the Human Rights Act, but under health and safety legislation or any other such legislation, that it makes up the rules as it goes along for fear that somebody might bring a case, whether or not it has merit. It would be hugely beneficial if many more cases were put before the courts so that the courts could say, “Don’t be so ridiculous; this is not defective in any way in human rights terms.”

I very much agree with the hon. Gentleman’s last point, other than that it would probably bog down the courts and cost a lot of money. Has he seen a publication from the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission? It is a very good plain English booklet giving clear examples of what is, and what is not, an infringement of human rights, using not real cases, but hypothetical ones involving real people, to illustrate very effectively how individual lives are affected. In parentheses, I urge the Minister to consider looking at publishing that on a wider basis throughout the remainder of the United Kingdom.

I agree. That has been brought to my attention and the more it is promulgated the more understanding we will have of what people can and cannot do.

I want to draw my hon. Friend’s attention to what has happened under this legislation, as under health and safety legislation, which is that officials have found themselves in the position of having to defend a decision that they wish they had not taken, or a course of action that had been taken on budgetary or other grounds, and finding the words “health and safety” or “human rights” very convenient refuges.

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right; unfortunately, that is often a refuge for the incompetent. Let me say in parentheses that in my experience far too often public bodies—public authorities—settle out of court on terms that are hugely disadvantageous to the public purse and to public polity simply to avoid going to court. They are wrong to do so. Thinking back again to my experiences as chairman of a police authority, they were wrong to do so. The chief constable often settled out of court on a complaint, and I would say to him, “Why on earth didn’t you take it to court? This is a preposterous case.” The reply would be, “Well, better safe than sorry; it might have cost us more.” That was not a proper solution, but, as a police authority chairman, I had no authority to prevent that from happening.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

I will do so, but I will then move on because the hon. Member for North-West Norfolk raised some important issues in respect of where we go next.

I agree with that last remark, but I wish to ask the hon. Gentleman to answer the following simple question. In terms of the matter under debate, does he not agree that it is the application of the universal principles that causes the inhibitions, the difficulties and the misinterpretations? Unless the law is specific, clear and unambiguous we are bound to get into a situation time and again in which public services or the police, or others, are over-cautious about matters.

The alternative is that, instead of having 3,000 new offences, we will multiply that by a factor of 10; we will have an entire lobbyful of new statutes from the Government. Of course there must be universal principles. What is wrong with universal principles of human rights? Do we not all subscribe to them? Are they not principles that we hold dear and that we want our law to be in accordance with? Of course they are, and that is what the Human Rights Act did. It caused no problems between 1950 and 1998, so why has it caused so many problems between 1998 and 2006? The answer to that is because of ill-informed and incompetent administration.

I am puzzled and confused by the Conservatives’ position on this issue. They say that they want to introduce a modern British Bill of Rights and by implication—or, rather, explicitly—they wish to repeal the Human Rights Act. That is the Conservative position. Setting aside the fact that that appears to be a bit of a back-of-an-envelope policy devised by the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron), I notice that at the time when it was released he had not consulted his party colleague, the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke), who was supposed to be leading a study group on the constitution and who described the proposals as “xenophobic and legal nonsense”. That might commend them to the hon. Member for Stone (Mr. Cash); that might be the settling argument so far as he is concerned.

Setting that aside, I really do want to understand what the Conservatives are talking about. Apparently—I think that the hon. Member for North-West Norfolk said this—they do not intend to withdraw from the European convention on human rights. So every single provision and article of the convention would still be law in this country, and would still be applicable to any British citizen through application to the court in Strasbourg. Of course, were the Conservatives to change their mind and to withdraw from the convention, that would mean that we would also withdraw from the European Union. Again, that is an argument that would commend itself to the hon. Member for Stone and to some others, but as I understand it, that is not the Conservative party’s position.

The Conservative Front-Bench spokesman raised the issues of the margin of appreciation and of proportionality, which are of course interpreted by our courts domestically. The European Court of Human Rights is reluctant to interfere with such domestic court decisions unless absolutely necessary. If there is no domestic court ruling, it is more likely that a claimant would be found against when interpreting the margin of appreciation and proportionality, rather than the other way round, simply because we would not have that domestic element to rely on.

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising that point, which I was about to come to. What would be the practical implications of applying such a dual regime? A lot has been made of the Chahal v. United Kingdom judgment, which, we must keep reminding ourselves, was made in 1996, when the Conservatives were on the Government Front Bench and the Human Rights Act had not even been conceived of as possible. The Chahal case is the extant jurisprudence on the subject, and the Conservatives are somehow suggesting that they will extricate themselves from the implications of that case without extricating themselves from the European convention on human rights. I cannot see how that can be done. Perhaps there will be a change in the European ruling; perhaps the Ramzy v. Netherlands case will come to a helpful conclusion, which is what the Government want. However, unless it does, so far as I can see, the law will remain unchanged and no amount of tinkering here will affect that binding jurisprudence elsewhere.

The Conservatives also say that they will be in a position to enter reservations on the European convention on human rights, but they must know that under article 57, it allows reservations to be made only on entry—on signing and ratifying the convention—and then only in respect of legislation that is in force at that time. So I am afraid that they have missed the boat regarding that opportunity by 57 years.

The margin of appreciation, to which the hon. Member for Hendon referred, does not apply only to the Germans because they have their basic law; it applies to us and to every signatory to the European convention on human rights. It is already applicable, so there is no gain whatsoever to be made in that regard. Far from being a gain, having two competing sets of human rights requirements would be the worst of all positions. There would be one set established by the European convention on human rights, and justiciable in Strasbourg; and another set established by the Conservatives’ British Bill of Rights—a local law for local people, providing local rights that would somehow be interpreted in a different way. Of course, they would not be interpreted differently, because people would go from one court to the other, there would be competing decisions and the result would be a legal nightmare. That is not a sensible provision.

If, instead of that, the Conservatives are talking about a constitutional Bill of Rights, for which we have argued for years—a provision that sets out the rights of the British people in democratic terms and avoids the abuse of power by the Executive—we are with them, and we have something on which we can do business, because that has been part of our policy for a long time. However, if they are talking about a Union Jack-stamped equivalent of the European convention on human rights, I am afraid that it is a non-starter.

Many others wish to speak, so I will conclude by saying simply this. It is very difficult to strike a balance between the rule of law and the difficulties that society faces, particularly, as we are often reminded, in the face of terrorism. It is not easily done, which is why we need the bedrock of the rights of the citizen. It is the easiest thing in the world to combat terrorism by just locking everybody up and throwing away the key. There would be no terrorism then, but it is not the British way—happily, it is not the European way since the European convention on human rights—and we should not espouse it. I am all for the rule of law, but I am all against the rule by tabloid editors, and that is why the Human Rights Act is so important.

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this important debate. I shall not repeat the many excellent points that were made by my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Redcar (Vera Baird), my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) and the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath). Given the time constraints, I want to focus on two issues: the meaning of “public authority”, and the Government’s commitment to ensuring that the public and the wider public sector have a better understanding of the Human Rights Act.

The understanding of the meaning of “public authority” is vital in ensuring the effectiveness of the HRA. There are many different providers of services to the public. Charities and voluntary groups provide services largely through taxpayers’ money via grants and agreements. Private companies receive public money in return for the services that they provide. Charitable groups provide services largely through donations from the public. Other providers receive money from the public in the form of lottery funding. The list goes on. I argue that, wherever a service provider is funding a service thanks to money that can be traced back to members of the public who are not paying for a direct transaction themselves as consumers but paying a third party to provide services for others, those third parties should be considered as public authorities and should have to comply with the HRA.

Charitable status in itself implies a public subsidy because of the tax concessions, so any body that has such status should also come under the HRA. If any such body complains that it cannot afford to comply with the HRA, it should seriously question whether it should be involved in the activities that it is undertaking. I am sure that the public giving donations or paying taxes do not want their money to prop up projects or regimes that do not respect users’ dignity and human rights.

I am therefore concerned about the fear, expressed in the Department for Constitutional Affairs’ review, that widening the definition of “public authority” could drive private providers out of the market. For a start, such a view could lead to considerable inconsistencies in different parts of the country. There could be a very different situation in an area in which an authority continues to manage a service in-house, compared with one in which its management has been contracted out. It would give rise to the absurd situation whereby redress against a public authority and a private provider would have to be approached in different ways. Far more worryingly, such an approach would send out the message that the HRA is of no concern to private providers.

The HRA is important not only for its legal implications, but for the culture that it creates. In other words, the Act is not simply about offering redress to those whose rights are infringed but, we hope, about creating a culture in which rights are respected and individuals do not have to turn to the law. It is therefore important to ensure that any provider that receives public money to offer a public service is included in the meaning of “public authority”.

We also need a positive promotion of what the HRA actually means. Let me draw a parallel. All but nine of the 785 MEPs are white, but five of those nine are British. While I am concerned about that very low figure for the whole of the EU, we can at least take pride in the fact that five of them are British—that we have made greater progress than many of our European partners in the representation of ethnic minorities in public life. That does not happen by accident. EU officials in Brussels may say that there is nothing legally to prevent members of ethnic minorities from becoming MEPs, but we know from experience that it takes more than that. It requires recognising that the matter is an issue and that we need a positive action plan to take steps to ensure more comprehensive representation of all sectors of society. It is exactly the same with human rights. It takes more than the mere existence of the Human Rights Act to engender a real understanding of the principles and how they translate into the realities of everyday life. That is a much greater task and has to be tackled on several different levels. That is why I welcome the commitment in the DCA review to ensuring that the public, and the wider public sector, are better informed about the benefits that the Act can provide for ordinary people.

We could start with education. Learning about human rights is an important part of citizenship education, but we need to ensure that it is delivered well. In some schools, citizenship education is tacked on to personal and social education and is often delivered by form teachers who have no preparation for it. While they may be enthusiastic and inspiring teachers in their own subject, they may have to deliver material with which they are scarcely familiar themselves. Indeed, if they are following a class of children from the age of 11 to 16, teachers may teach that lesson or module only once in five years. Citizenship education is far too important for that.

Citizenship education should include helping young people to develop a meaningful understanding of human rights and it needs to be delivered by a team of specialist teachers who have the time to prepare the lessons thoroughly and deliver them to numerous classes, so that they develop an expertise in dealing with the issues that young people raise. Teachers should also be able to inspire and stimulate meaningful discussion.

The same needs to happen throughout Government. We need concerted programmes across the whole of Government, throughout the public sector and for all of those who are acting in the capacity of the public sector, so that there is a proper understanding of what the Human Rights Act means in practice and of when it is relevant and when it is not relevant.

Some sectors of society and the media have taken a perverse pleasure in making fun of what they call political correctness, ignoring the fundamental thinking behind the concept—ensuring that sectors of society that have frequently suffered discrimination and abuse are not subject to sexist, racist, homophobic or other disparaging comments—and they are doing the same thing with the concept of human rights. The term has been bandied about carelessly and cited as a factor when, as my hon. Friends illustrated, it was completely irrelevant. Such carelessness, or even downright ridiculing, is damaging. First, it fudges the whole issue of what human rights are, why they matter and how the legislation can provide valuable guidelines to what we in a civilised society may expect as a norm when it comes to respecting the dignity and rights of others. The issue is not just the threat of court action or actually going to court, but that the guidelines should be fundamental to our thinking.

The issue of Catholic adoption agencies raises the question of the provision of public services in the context that the hon. Lady described. Does she accept that there are two conflicting issues? First, there is the question whether there should be discrimination against people on grounds of gender and so on. Secondly, under article 11, there is the equally important and entrenched right of freedom of religion and of conscience. How does she reconcile those two provisions in relation to adoption agencies?

I see a fundamental problem with a charitable religious organisation doing something with Government money but wanting to be exempted from legislation. However, that is not relevant to the Human Rights Act, which does not cover adoption by same-sex couples. The right to marriage does not include anything about civil partnership. However, I agree that there is an issue if people who use public money do not want to comply with the law of the land.

We need to be clear that, when we are talking about human rights we are usually talking about the rights of ordinary people—the vulnerable, the elderly, the disabled, the sick and the young. Careless talk about human rights sometimes implies that individuals or groups of individuals should not have rights. That is dangerous thinking and ignores the concept of the universality of human rights. Of course, difficult situations arise in which rights can conflict, and an appropriate balance has to be struck. But we have to remember the thinking behind the Human Rights Act, which was to bring the issue of human rights home. Instead of the need to spend years taking a case to the European Court of Human Rights, the same protection can be provided in this country. What matters now is that we ensure that there is proper understanding throughout society of what the HRA means and its sensible use to ensure the rights and dignity of all.

Listening to the debate so far, one wonders why there was a need for it. The confidence of the Government, the Chairman of the Joint Committee on Human Rights and indeed the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) would seem to admit no difficulties in respect of the HRA. The Minister gave a curious history of the issue. The issues that confronted the greatest Labour Government of the 20th century were the very issues that this House and this country are still tussling over.

The Attlee Government was concerned about questions of enforceability and the divergence between the civil and common law approaches. They believed in a narrowly defined series of rights, whereas the legal tradition of France, Italy and Belgium preferred the evolution of a jurisprudence of the rights of a court. Theirs was the civil law tradition, as opposed to the common law tradition. The Attlee Government were also opposed to a system of individual petition and a court of compulsory jurisdiction. However, the exigencies of the day—including the political anxieties of the European continent, the coup in Czechoslovakia and the majority of just six after the 1950 election—meant that the draft convention was accepted.

Lord Chancellor Jowitt regarded that acceptance as inevitable for political reasons, even though he wrote in his memorandum to the Cabinet Committee that, from the point of view of administration of law, he regarded that necessity as “an unqualified misfortune”. It was ratified by the United Kingdom in March 1951 with no reservations and it was a seminal piece of legislation. It was a major constitutional break with British practice. It was not quite on the scale of the European Union accession treaties, but it opened up our system of law and the sovereignty of Parliament to challenge by an extraterritorial court. It committed the United Kingdom Government in international law to protecting certain of the rights of its citizens. The proper relations between the citizen and the state were now a legal as well as a political issue. The Rubicon was crossed.

The right to petition was granted in 1965, but the first case that the United Kingdom Government lost was Golder v. United Kingdom in 1975. In that case, the court implied in article 6 a right of access to the courts. I do not quibble with that as it seems logical in itself, but its importance was that a contracting state was bound by more than the rights that appear on the face of the convention. No one reading the original convention could possibly have an objection to its provisions; they are a summation of our common law rights. Some of them are in our Bill of Rights and they are repeated, almost word for word in some articles, in the first 10 amendments to the United States constitution. The importance of those rights is more than that of those that appear on the face of the document. Counsel for the United Kingdom argued that the UK

“had no intention of assuming, and did not know that it was expected to assume”

an obligation to accord a right of access to the courts, yet in international law it was held to be bound by such a right.

In Tyrer v. the United Kingdom in 1978, the Court majority declared that the European convention is a living instrument, which must be interpreted in the light of present-day conditions. That encapsulates the broader tension in the role of the convention and its interpretive organs. In “Civil Liberties and Human Rights in England and Wales”, Professor Feldman—the most distinguished adviser to the Joint Committee on Human Rights—notes that

“other states acquire an interest in the way in which a state is treating people within its jurisdiction. That interest can be pursued not only through international diplomacy but also through international law.”

That presents a dilemma for Dicey’s view of the British constitution, and we do ourselves small justice if we do not consider those tensions. The reason the Government are both divided and on the back foot over the so-called human rights issue is that they are caught: a judgment can be made through law—through legal instruments—but it can be confounded because we breach not the headline articles but an expansive Court that leads us into territory that was unconsidered and unrealised by the originating Labour Government.

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the courts always do that in relation to domestic legislation? Over the years, they have often interpreted legislation to give rights beyond those the Government might have wanted or even envisaged. When we ratified and incorporated the convention in domestic law, that was no different from when we did so in relation to other measures.

Of course it was, because under domestic law, and before the embracement of the European convention on human rights, there was only one judge as to who and what the law should be. Judges interpreting the law in an individual case could be set right by Parliament. The Human Rights Act refers to a key document to which I give great grace—the right of the Law Lords to make a judgment of incompatibility. That is the trick by which the measure tries to reconcile the new process with the doctrine of the supremacy of Parliament. At the time, the then Lord Chancellor and the then Home Secretary—now the Leader of the House—made much of that provision. That is the answer to the hon. Gentleman’s question.

Like the Minister, I was setting out a parallel history, because I believe that the measure sets up a profound tension between our constitutional arrangements and those of international law. The Court in Strasbourg takes on a whole raft of international human rights instruments and by so doing imports them directly into British law. That moves across a terrific field, so my criticism, and my anxiety, is that, just like that extraordinarily well-regarded Cabinet all those years ago, I fear that the headline rights—those we struggled for and acquired in this country—suddenly have an interpretation far beyond anything I can comprehend. The Labour Cabinet was confident that we would never appear before the European Court of Human Rights.

My final observation is that respect for our liberties and our freedoms is important to our democracy. It has been a long march and, in an extraordinary way, as we reached democracy by the middle of the last century, the power of the Executive in the House of Commons was the dominant force. That power is not always sensitive to what a 17th-century gentleman would have regarded as liberty. As we look through Locke and the interpretations of the philosophies of the time, we find that there was always a reserve: if a Government stepped beyond their purpose—the protection of liberty—there were other means to achieve it. Governments feared the mob. That was one of the outside interjections, but so, too, was reasoned public opinion. We have moved on from the divine right of kings, although sometimes listening to Government Front Benchers one would think they were acting with divine certitude. However, as we see them crumble, we know that all things come to an end.

The Human Rights Act has been a Trojan horse in one sense, because the declaration of incompatibility has halted the Government in some of their wilder extravagances, as they encroach on our time-honoured sense of what are appropriate civil liberties, which has been carefully crafted over the centuries. I tell the Minister, as I tell the Lord Chancellor, or the Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs, or whatever diminution he finds appropriate, that the measure has always lacked common consent. That constitutional change was never referred to the British people; it was shouted out, “This is the way we must go.” A long time ago, people—people such as me in all humility—who were anxious about Plato’s “Republic” knew that they did not want a class of people beyond my reach to determine how they should live. I do not want Plato’s guardians to govern me and I suspect that that is deep in the psyche of the British people. Judges are for the administration of justice under the authority of Parliament, not of international instruments that can undermine the very political processes that enable the parties to allocate their arguments about what is to be done to improve the condition, freedoms and liberties of the people.

I come to the debate on a slightly historical note. All the talk about Magna Carta in speeches made by Lord Falconer and so on completely misses the point of what we are considering this evening. When I was shadow Attorney-General I made clear from the Front Bench my opposition to the Human Rights Act. At the time, that caused a little controversy but as things have turned out, the Opposition are formally committed to repealing the Act. I was very pleased to hear what my hon. Friend the Member for North-West Norfolk (Mr. Bellingham) said from the Front Bench earlier. There are profoundly good reasons for that commitment, to some of which I have alluded in interventions, in particular the fact that none of the rights and responsibilities that are certainly important to people cannot properly and adequately be dealt with by our own legislation in the House.

For those who wish to refer back to Magna Carta, important and symbolic as it was, I draw their attention to the fact that the barons themselves were as shady a bunch of people as one could possibly come across. Furthermore, when it was signed in 1215 or 1216, Magna Carta was regarded as a virtually useless document and it simply was not implemented. It was only later that people considered the intrinsic questions that lay at the heart of the document and those questions are important irrespective of whether Magna Carta was signed by King John. There is some doubt that it was.

Magna Carta was about containing the power of the Crown and it subjected the Crown to the rule of law. It was also about ensuring that there was habeas corpus and a right to a fair trial. There was no reference to freedom of speech, freedom of conscience or freedom of choice, and despite what I heard Lord Bragg say the other day in a programme about Magna Carta, nor was there any reference to democracy or democratic elections. The fact is that the intrinsic importance of the development of our democratic system is at the heart of what we should be debating today and it does not derive from Magna Carta. In fact, the right of democratic decision making in the House is alien to the concept of our adopting a universal declaration and enforcing it in our courts by the judiciary. I refer to the judicial activism of the courts at the expense of the decision making by this House on laws properly passed by those elected in general elections as representatives of the people.

I have developed over a number of years much the same argument about legislative supremacy in relation to the European Union. I am glad to say that my party endorsed that argument when it agreed to my amendment on the legislative supremacy of the House in relation to the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act 2006. We whipped my proposal for legislative supremacy both in this House and subsequently in the House of Lords, and I stand by that principle. My greatest aversion to the Human Rights Act and to the European convention on human rights results from the fact that they take away by implication—although we can override them if we so wish—the intrinsic right and intrinsic ingredients of our decision making in this House.

I am not arguing that we should abolish human rights. That would be absurd; it would be obscene. That is not the point I am making. What I am saying concerns trying to achieve a proper balance between the individual and the state, and that is why I, my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr. Shepherd) and a few others at the beginning so objected to the idea of identity cards. In the debate, I held up to the Home Secretary George Orwell’s book “1984” and said, “This is the kind of world that you will introduce to this country.” From that moment on, we began to make a significant change in our policy and now, I am glad to say, my party is opposed to ID cards for the reason that I have given.

Perhaps the hon. Gentleman is coming to this, but can he explain for the benefit of the House how the lonely individual would then be able to take on the state and the abuses of the state if he did not have the protection of the Human Rights Act to lean on? How would the hon. Gentleman protect that lonely individual?

That is an absolutely vital point. It is up to the House of Commons and Parliament as a whole to ensure that those rights are sustained. I gave the instance of habeas corpus as a very good example. I referred to my criticisms of the Prevention of Terrorism Bill when I intervened on the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) and I was appalled by the fact that those on the Opposition Front Bench ring-fenced the Human Rights Act in an unholy deal with the Liberal Democrats in order to embarrass the Government when the Bill got to the House of Lords. I objected to such ring-fencing because I said that it was possible for us to ensure that we got the balance right between ensuring that alleged suspects would have the right to habeas corpus, a fair trial and due process—that would ensure their rights—and ensuring public security by legislating for ourselves, notwithstanding the provisions of the Human Rights Act that have not worked in respect of several control orders and the fact that several of the alleged suspects have escaped in circumstances that derive from the very fact that they were not put under sufficiently stringent requirements.

rose—

The hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) signed my amendment so I do not know what he will say when he intervenes.

I was going to ask the hon. Gentleman how the system he envisages will protect an individual when both Houses of Parliament pass legislation that allows somebody to be detained indefinitely in prison without charge and without trial when they have no remedy because Parliament says that they should have no rights.

I dealt with that very question with the then Home Secretary and I think that it perhaps played some part in his ultimate removal. I challenged him specifically on the question of habeas corpus and he was in a complete muddle. He did not know what to say, because he could not tell me whether it was or was not applicable. He contradicted himself. As I said in my speech at that time, the point is that the rule of habeas corpus is the ultimate and most sacred provision available to judges in all circumstances. It overrides all other requirements of the judiciary. As Lord Steyn and a number of distinguished judges have made clear, their most sacred duty is to ensure habeas corpus.

My answer to the hon. Gentleman is very simple. These rights are inherent in our system and cannot be overridden. In relation to control orders, the “red judges”, as we call them, would in the circumstances that I envisage go in to make sure that there was no unfair treatment of alleged suspects even if we were 90 per cent. certain that they were terrorists. They must be treated properly. However, that is not the way in which the Human Rights Act operates—hence the control orders and the problems that have flowed from them.

Another aspect on the formulation of legislation—I am talking about the whole breadth of legislation—has to be considered carefully. A paper was produced, although I do not think that it was in the days when I was shadowing the Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs. By the way, however, I am not sure whether Lord Falconer of Thoroton is the Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs or the Lord Chancellor, and when he is which and when he is the other. The fact remains that in this paper produced in July last year, it is made crystal clear on page 20 that, in respect of the provisions for making a statement of compatibility,

“The result is that all Government Bills coming before Parliament since the Act”—

the Human Rights Act 1998—

“became law must have been through a process of careful scrutiny by officials and lawyers in order to brief the relevant Minister prior to the Minister certifying their view.”

It goes on to say:

“Questions of proportionality, and the identification of policy options that produce the least interference with Convention rights, should be embedded in the policy development process… Guidance to departments has consistently made it clear that human rights proofing is not simply an exercise to be carried out after legislation has been drafted.”

In other words, we have sold ourselves down the river lock, stock and barrel to this principle of universality contained in the European convention on human rights—and, for that matter, in the 1948 universal declaration of human rights that was passed in the United Nations. We have therefore handed over to the courts at the same time the application of the law in order to ensure that these principles set out in the paper are complied with. It is like the hunting of the snark.

The plain fact is that all civil servants and every public authority are under an obligation to give effect to these principles irrespective of their practicality. No wonder all these problems have arisen, to which the Minister, my hon. Friends and the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome have referred. Misunderstandings are bound to arise from the impossibility of being able to relate these universal principles to practical circumstances. That is where the advantages of our common law system, which deals with specific cases in specific ways, are clear. The effect of the universal application of these principles has created problems for our statute law in that, although we can override it—as the case of Simms v. O’Brien and Lord Hoffmann’s judgment on the Human Rights Act made clear—the general application of the system employed and set out in this paper ensures that the whole of the human rights principles is embedded in the manner in which all Government Bills are introduced. That is where the problem lies. We no longer have regard to specific circumstances, which is one of the reasons why we get into such difficulty over the whole question of terrorism.

The issue of terrorism has brought up the whole question of public security and the safety of the nation in a way that is frequently inconsistent with the universal application of these principles as set forward in the European convention on human rights, the Human Rights Act and, indeed, the United Nations human rights declaration of 1948. Indeed, I would go even further. I went back to find out about the rapporteur of the universal declaration, who turned out to be a Mr. Charles Malik, one of the great jurists of the time. He said that there were four basic principles. Among other things, he said:

“In my opinion, there is here involved the deepest danger of the age, namely, the extinction of the human person as such in his own individuality and ultimate inviolability, and therefore, the disappearance of real freedom of choice.”

That freedom of choice lies in our democratic system. That is what we should rely upon to guarantee, through elected representatives and through our democratic system, that we make appropriate provision for the specific circumstances and do not draw down these generalised universal principles, which then fall foul of the specific difficulties that arise from time to time. Edmund Burke understood that completely. This is where we have gone wrong.

There is a very simple lesson to be learned from this debate. It is that universal declarations do not work and that we should be specific in safeguarding people’s liberties. The rights of the people are vested in this House of Commons, which is where decisions should be taken on behalf of the British people as a whole.

I shall first address some comments to the hon. Member for North-West Norfolk (Mr. Bellingham), who talked about the abolition of the Human Rights Act but did not take an intervention from me in which I would have asked how then the protection would be given to the individual. Despite his best efforts, the hon. Member for Stone (Mr. Cash) did not fully embrace those issues. If the Conservative party is going down that line, Conservative Members owe it to the nation to spell out in their Bill of Rights how the lonely individual who wants to take on the excesses of local authority, the Government or one of the other institutions of our land will have the right, the wherewithal and the justification to do so.

I did answer the hon. Gentleman right at the very end, with a simple proposition about freedom of choice. I called in aid the rapporteur of the universal declaration of human rights, who said that the most important thing is freedom of choice. That is the democratic freedom of choice, which is how to defend the people of this country—individually.

The hon. Gentleman is either deliberately missing the point or wants to mislead the House in believing that this is just about habeas corpus. It is not; it is much wider than that. Human rights embrace much more than that. The right to hold a different view is enshrined. Habeas corpus would not protect that right. He was completely wrong in emphasising only habeas corpus. Once again, doing that will create the very myths of which many hon. Members are critical.

My hon. Friend the Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) was right to bring the Government to account by asking why they have taken so long to hold this debate. Those myths have persisted in the minds of the public and others since the introduction of the Bill. Why has it taken the Government six years to start to try to unravel them? Why was it not a Government responsibility to explain to the people of this country, and, indeed, to the House, what the implications would be? Why is it now, six years on, that we are seeking to find a definition of a public body? Why has it taken so long?

I ask the Minister to clarify in her winding-up speech the point that I made in an intervention on her opening speech. I am still not clear how her Department will help those public bodies disseminate through their systems the way in which they should make such judgments. That is the point at which I differ from my hon. Friend. I do not blame the people who make those decisions and the wariness that some of them have. I am still a member of a local authority, and I have witnessed cases in which people at a very low level have made decisions that have been subsequently challenged in court, and they have not had the right advice and guidance at hand.

Many of those decisions, such as the one in the case of the man on the roof, were made by operational commanders on the spot at the time, and for the right reasons. They were facing a dilemma: should they bring down the man by force, or should they try to talk him off the roof by answering his plea for food and the specific naming of the food that he wanted? I do not share my hon. Friend’s view that this is a bureaucratic nightmare, with people making the wrong decisions because they are over-cautious. When they make the wrong decisions, in most instances it is because they have been badly informed, or not informed, about the rights. There is an obligation on the Government to explain the position fully.

I draw to the Minister’s attention the fact that the House is entitled to an answer to the question that the Joint Committee on Human Rights asked about the 2004 review. In response to the specific question raised by the Select Committee, the answer was:

“The 2004 Strategic Review has been superseded by the Review of the Implementation of the Human Rights Act. No useful purpose would now be served by its publication.”

How do we know what was raised in the 2004 review that necessitated a subsequent review of the implementation of Human Rights Act? How do we know that the right issues are not being tackled? How do we in the House, and the great British public, who in the main believe some of the myths that are being perpetrated, know that the Government are not delivering yet another smokescreen? The impression will be spread that there is something to hide. Why hide it?

Okay, the strategic review has been superseded by yet another review, but surely that review came to some conclusions about where the priority should lie and what the subsequent review should take on board. The House is entitled to a proper explanation of why we were unable to have that information. If it is so irrelevant, what is there to hide? Give it out: let us read it and understand it. Let us see for ourselves. Let us make citizens’ judgments on what the Government said about their own legislation. It is nonsense not to allow that.

I share the views of the hon. Member for Llanelli (Nia Griffith), who made an excellent and thoughtful speech on behalf of the people who are in a position to be challenged time and again in relation to the legislation. Surely we owe it to them to make a clear statement of intent, to say who is covered. It is no good the Prime Minister saying in a speech that he believes that the public and the private sector should be treated the same, if that is not developed in such a way as to carry it forward into law. The current legislation allows the private sector to walk away. The hon. Lady was right to say that where bodies can trace their financing back to a public source in any way, they should be covered by public legislation in the same way as any bona fide local authority. There has to be either a sensible argument against that, or a sensible case for legislation to be amended to take account of it.

I am slightly puzzled about what the hon. Gentleman means. If I buy my newspaper from WH Smith with my social security benefits, which would have a public source, does that mean that WH Smith becomes a public authority? How far back do we take the financing in order for a body to qualify as a public authority? That is the difficulty. I have given a frivolous example to make the point.

The Minister was right to identify her example as frivolous. It was also hopelessly off the point that was made by the hon. Member for Llanelli, which I am attempting to elaborate on. It is unfair that the public sector is challenged on a daily basis across the country over the way in which it provides home care, yet the private sector is in some way exempt from that. The hon. Lady made it quite clear—other Members have alluded to this—that the public purse being used was really about the provision of services to the public in connection with a service that may no longer be provided in the public sector. That applies to health, some forms of education, social care, drug rehabilitation and so on. It even applies to the way in which prisoners are treated by the private sector and the public sector. Prisoners being dealt with by a private company presumably do not have the same protection if they are being transported—[Interruption.] The Minister nods and says that they do. I hope that that is the case.

Nevertheless, there is still the point about clarification, which is what the Select Committee sought. Members will know from what confronts them on a weekly basis at their advice centres that many people are confused about who is covered and who is not, and who has a right to challenge an authority under the legislation and who does not. Many lawyers will probably become very rich by giving out the idea that this is an easy trail for people to follow, but it most certainly is not.

I ask the Minister to look at specific cases—if we really do cherish the idea of human rights. I happen to believe that a country’s citizens judge themselves by their willingness to have those rights properly protected and enshrined, and that all citizens should be given the same rights to protect themselves and their interests, as stipulated in the Bill. Most reasonable people in the United Kingdom would suggest that those are rights that we deserve to have, which people over the generations have died to defend in this country.

I do not take lightly the suggestion that there is abuse of the system—we know that there is. Time and again, the Government abuse the system. On a weekly basis at my advice centre, I meet people who have sought leave to extend their legal right to remain in this country. They were granted leave to appeal. Their asylum application failed, but nevertheless they were given four years to remain. They attempt to renew that and are told that their case will be dealt with within 13 weeks. I have in excess of 100 cases pending where that time has been exceeded by at least 12 months, and in some instances by nearly two years. Many of those people have lost their jobs, because they have no legal proof to say that they have a right to a job in the United Kingdom. That is costing the state more money. Yet, when they seek advice to find out whether they can challenge the state, they are told that they do not have that right. The situation is bizarre. We have a Government who want to defend human rights, yet neglect to address them when it comes to the way in which they, as agents of the state, behave.

It is sad that the Government are not prepared to fund the European Court properly. The Court has a funding crisis, and a person taking a case there can expect to wait for anything from eight to 10 years, because there is a huge backlog of cases. However, the Government, along with other European countries, have perpetrated zero growth on the Court’s budget, which inevitably means that its work is heavily restricted. Why have we heard no proper explanation of the Government’s actions on that count? If they care about human rights, they must prove that in the various international bodies to which they belong—and sadly, they do not.

I am a member of the parliamentary delegation to the Council of Europe. Why is that body so strapped for funds? The very organisation that was set up 50-odd years ago to build on what Winston Churchill wanted—a body defending the very things over which we had just fought a war, in which millions of people died to defend them—is strapped for cash. Hon. Members on both sides of the House who are representatives at the Council of Europe have argued time and again that Ministers should change the way in which we treat that organisation. It is a national disgrace that we are not prepared to examine these issues properly and fairly.

I have listened with great interest to all hon. Members who have spoken. They have all commented about the fact that the Act is confusing to members of the public. That has perhaps led to people having a genuine hatred of the thought of human rights cropping up. I meet people who want to specify an infringement of their human rights as one aspect of their objection to a planning application. I am sure that other Members have had similar experiences. It is difficult to persuade such people that they need something more than that if their objection is to succeed. Why is such a thing happening? This is about not only citizenship training and disinformation put out by the media. We can talk about the media as much as we like, but they are not to blame. The House and the Government are to blame for the mess that the Act has got into and the misrepresentation throughout our nation to which that has led. They now have an opportunity to put the situation right.

I hope that the Minister has listened to what has been said. All hon. Members have attempted in their speeches to defend the right of the individual to the rights that each of us cherish. Having such rights enshrined in law is a fundamental way of judging in a state’s worth, and taking that away would be a big mistake. However, the citizens of this country should have the right to have those rights explained to them properly, and I suspect that the Government have a real desire to do just that.

We have concentrated fairly largely on the human rights aspect of our debate on values, rights and responsibilities. I hope to touch on values and responsibilities in my contribution. However, I have a long-standing interest in, and concern about, human rights. I am a former secretary of an Amnesty International group that looked after the rights of prisoners of conscience, as they were called then—I do not know whether that is still the case. They were people from countries throughout the world who were imprisoned for no other reason than the beliefs that they held, rather than physical violence of any form.

One of my concerns is the secular way in which aspects of human rights legislation are starting to be interpreted. We have recently seen examples of that in the House during our consideration of the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 and the sexual orientation regulations. I am worried that we are subtly—perhaps even inadvertently—introducing a hierarchy of rights in which the secular trumps the religious on every occasion. I do not know whether that is intentional, or whether the situation has crept in that direction over time.

A few days ago, I received a petition from one of my constituents. Organised, I believe, by Premier Christian Radio, it is entitled, “Declaration to Protect Christian Values”. I shall read it out—it is very brief. It states:

“As a citizen of the British Commonwealth, I am requesting by my signature below that you as a Member of Parliament give the rights of Christians equal value when drafting or voting on legislation. Whilst I understand and embrace the need to uphold the rights of other groups and beliefs,”—

quite right—

“the rights of Christians should not be compromised or subordinated to placate those views. Thank you for upholding the rights of all citizens, including Christians.”

That expresses some of the concern. Perhaps other hon. Members’ constituents have sent similar petitions to them.

The sexual orientation regulations arose from a European directive—I am not saying anything against Brussels; that just happens to be the case. The directive, 2000/78, calls for a framework for equal treatment in employment and occupation and outlaws discrimination based on religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation. I am sure that all of us here agree with that. The directive also stated that the EU

“respects and does not prejudice the status under national law of churches and religious associations”.

What is interesting is that the EU left member states free to make specific provisions for religion, but the UK Government chose to redefine employment and occupation to include the work of adoption agencies, which is worrying, because that has not been done in other EU countries. At present, unmarried couples and homosexual couples may seek the services of almost any adoption agency in the land other than the Catholic agencies. The Government are shortly to introduce legislation under which the Catholic agencies will not be able to operate, because they operate on the principle, which is true to their conscience, of saying that they wish to place children only with married couples.

What worries me is that we have breached a conscience provision already established in law. We allow doctors, on grounds of conscience, not to perform abortions. We give women a legal right to have an abortion if they so choose, but we do not give them a specific legal right to go to a particular doctor regardless of whether that doctor wants to perform an abortion. It seems that, shortly, there will be a fundamental inconsistency in that area of law, and I wonder whether it is just a matter of time before the Government get rid of that conscience provision covering doctors.

With specific reference to the Catholic adoption agencies, I endorse my hon. Friend’s principal point. On the tight question of the conflict between the provisions preserving freedom of conscience and of religion and those prohibiting sexual discrimination, does my hon. Friend agree that when push comes to shove, the Government, at the tipping point, go the wrong way by giving preference to one side of the argument over the other? Is not that exactly what happened in relation to the Catholic adoption agencies? Freedom of conscience and of religion were overridden.

My hon. Friend makes a fair point. I am concerned about the hierarchy of rights. The history of this country, going back to the Toleration Act 1689, demonstrates that we have followed the fundamental principle of allowing differences of view to co-exist happily, rather than seeking an overarching, dictatorial format.

In a different sphere, there are numerous examples of charities operating in the public sphere, perhaps with public funds, now finding themselves excluded from applying for public funds. I understand that about a third of Christian charities now feel that they are being discriminated against, not because they want to proselytise or convert—it would be wrong of them to do that with public money—but because they want to be authentic and to care for people, the poor and the marginalised, in the way that they are motivated to do.

Let me give three recent examples. On 10 February, Charles Moore wrote about a charity in south London that ministered to single mothers of all faiths and none. It has been denied funds purely because, on its website, it shows that it is a Christian charity. It sought assistance for the very good work that it was doing, but it received a letter of rejection that said:

“your assistance for single parents includes extending Christian comfort and offering prayer”.

That was deemed so outrageous and wrong that it was sufficient reason why the charity should not seek to continue doing the kind of good work that Christian charities, indeed charities of all faiths, have done for many years.

The second example is of a woman who wanted to be a foster parent to older children. We need more foster parents, but she was refused permission on the following grounds:

“your beliefs do not allow you to actively promote another religion for a child”.

How stupid to deny foster children in need of care the services of an otherwise excellent foster parent.

The third example concerns a small Christian charity. My hon. Friend the Member for North-West Norfolk (Mr. Bellingham), who is on the Front Bench, will take note, as it operates from Framingham Earl in Norfolk; I do not know whether that is in his constituency. It tries to help people in the area out of prostitution. It says that the situation is one of

“discrimination…on people who simply want to help those less fortunate than themselves”.

It says that it thinks that the attitude

“comes from people who probably have scant knowledge of the Christian faith and principles”.

It comments that it is deeply worrying that the work that Churches and Christians have done over the centuries to help fight poverty and relieve deprivation is being called into question.

Those are worrying issues, and they were brought home to me vividly only the Friday before last in my own constituency. A gentleman came to see me in my surgery. He was a father with a partner and two children, and his partner is very shortly to have her third child. His income support had been taken away from him, and his family had literally no money. They had one bottle of milk in the fridge and one loaf of bread in the larder; that was it for the weekend. It was half-past 5 on a Friday night, and he asked what I could do. I rang the office of the district manager for Jobcentre Plus; to its credit, there was someone there at half-past 5 on a Friday night. I spoke to the lady there, but of course the local jobcentre was shut, and it was too late to get an emergency loan. She asked, “Do you have a Salvation Army branch locally?” and I said yes.

I put in a call to Major David Squibb of the Leighton Buzzard Salvation Army, and he went out that weekend with food parcels for that family. The family was fed over the weekend because of that man’s Christian vocation and commitment. Public sector workers are wonderful people, but at half-past 5 on a cold Friday evening in winter, the organs of the state were not available, locally or nationally, and could not go and feed a hungry family that had no money and no food. We have to recognise that Christians who do such work are motivated by their faith and their beliefs. If we take that away from them, we will harm those who are most marginalised in our society, and who need their support. I commend what Major David Squibb did, and I have no doubt that the Salvation Army and many other bodies do similar work in all our constituencies.

What worries me is that the Government, in their move to end multiculturalism—something that the Prime Minister talked about in his speech of 8 December 2006—are trying to push matters of faith entirely into the private domain. There was much in the Prime Minister’s speech, which underpinned the values that we are talking about, that I welcome, that was wonderful, and that I have called for many times, both in the House and outside. We need to focus not on what divides us, but on what unites us as a country, such as the English language, and our shared loyalty to the institutions of the country and to our sovereign—all that brings us together. We can all sign up to something that the Prime Minister summarised succinctly at Prime Minister’s questions a week or so ago, when he basically said, “Diversity, good; division, bad”. That is exactly the message of the Toleration Act 1689.

The Prime Minister said in his speech in December:

“But when it comes to our essential values—belief in democracy, the rule of law, tolerance, equal treatment for all, respect for this country and its shared heritage—then that is where we come together, it is what we hold in common; it is what gives us the right to call ourselves British. At that point no distinctive culture or religion supersedes our duty to be part of an integrated United Kingdom.”

Reading between the lines, he was probably saying that we are going to set our face firmly against Sharia law, which is absolutely right. I do not want to be ruled by a Christian theocracy, either, but I am worried that the Prime Minister is pushing matters of faith out of the public sphere or realm entirely and into private practice. In other words, we are happy with Christian people, but not with Christian citizens. That should be of concern in this of all years, as we celebrate the 200th anniversary of Wilberforce’s achievement in abolishing slavery. If he had been required to confine his beliefs to his personal life and not expand them, as he and many others did, in the House, how much the poorer would we be, and how much longer would the terrible tragedy of slavery have continued in this country and around the world? I urge the Minister to reflect on those concerns, not least the relief of the poverty experienced by many of our constituents.

It is a privilege to follow my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous), who made an extremely eloquent and thoughtful contribution on human rights and values.

The Human Rights Act should be repealed, and the United Kingdom should withdraw from the European convention on human rights. That view may not find a great deal of favour in the Westminster village, but it has gained favour in the country at large. As a member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, I do not believe that it is enough simply to repeal the Human Rights Act. The UK must curtail courts’ ability to adjudicate on the basis of the ECHR, which necessarily involves withdrawing from the convention, and not merely unincorporating it from UK law. Criminal rights legislation must be scrapped in its entirety. The Human Rights Act gave UK courts the ability to adjudicate directly on the basis of the ECHR. Prior to the incorporation of the convention in UK law, domestic courts referred to it in a limited way, but since incorporation they have adjudicated with growing frequency on the basis of the ECHR. In doing so, they have begun actively to prevent our democratically elected Government from responding to serious challenges facing the country.

Public policy solutions must be developed to respond to the new challenges posed by terrorism and the mass movement of people, but human rights legislation prevents us from developing effective responses to those challenges. There are three cases in which it can be shown that it is not simply the Human Rights Act that is at fault but the ECHR: the failure to deport nine Afghan hijackers; the granting of freedom to Anthony Rice to commit murder; and the failure to deport foreign criminals. Apologists for the Human Rights Act will undoubtedly, and disingenuously, try to make the case that it is not the Act per se that is at fault, but that is correct only insofar as it is the ECHR rather than the Act that is to blame.

On 10 May 2006, the High Court overturned the Home Secretary’s decision that it was not appropriate to grant nine Afghan nationals discretionary leave to enter the UK. The Government’s reaction to the High Court judgment suggested that the High Court had somehow incorrectly interpreted human rights law. The implication seemed to be that the Human Rights Act was at fault. This was not, strictly speaking, the case. It was the European convention on human rights, as much asthe Act, that was responsible for the failure to remove the nine supposed hijackers.

The decision that the nine Afghan nationals could not be returned to Afghanistan was taken not by the High Court on 10 May 2006, but by a panel of three immigration adjudicators on 9 June 2004, and the adjudicators ruled that the Afghans be allowed to remain in the UK under article 3 of the European convention on human rights. The adjudicators’ decision was not made on the basis of any disputed interpretation of the Human Rights Act. Rather, it was the interpretation of the European convention on human rights by the Strasbourg court that was responsible. The hijackers were correctly refused asylum by the adjudicators under the Geneva refugee convention, but they were given what is, in effect, a back-door asylum right under the ECHR.

Another big myth about the human rights legislation is that surrounding the decision to give freedom to Anthony Rice. Again, it is highly disingenuous—

Before the hon. Gentleman moves away from the topic of the Afghan hijackers, my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) has already mentioned that the finding of fact basis on which the decision not to send them back was made was that they would be subject to pursuit, persecution and almost certain assassination by the Taliban. Is the hon. Gentleman seeking freedom to do exactly that?

Absolutely not. I am simply pointing out that the decision was made under the ECHR. I very much hope that a responsible Home Secretary would never return somebody who faced the risk of torture. My purpose is to point out that it is not the Human Rights Act, but the European convention, that is responsible.

On 10 May 2006 Her Majesty’s inspector of probation published a report of his review of the case of Anthony Rice. The report found that one of the reasons the Parole Board had underestimated the risk of harm to others when it decided that Rice was safe to release was that

“the people managing his case started to allow public protection considerations to be undermined by its human rights considerations”.

At the time the Human Rights Act was introduced, it was the stated aspiration of the Government that the Act would be more than merely a technical instrument to enable courts to adjudicate on the basis of the ECHR. It was hoped that the Act would bring about a fundamental transformation towards a “human rights culture”. The Anthony Rice case suggests that the Government have been all too successful in creating precisely such a culture. A vague “human rights culture” ensured that parole officials set a convicted criminal free to murder. Mr. Rice was set free because the Parole Board feared that human rights legislation meant that if it did not release him under licence, the courts would step in and do so anyway.

The third myth about human rights is represented by the failure to deport foreign prisoners. On 3 May 2006 the Home Secretary made a statement to the House setting out proposals to change the system governing the deportation of foreign prisoners. The statement followed the revelation that substantial numbers of foreign prisoners who would have been considered for deportation on their release had instead been freed into the community.

Again, it is deeply invidious to imply that human rights legislation is not at fault for that catastrophic failure of public policy. The courts have chosen to interpret articles of the ECHR, regardless of whether the ECHR is incorporated into UK law, in such a way as effectively to prevent deportation to many third countries, including other countries that have signed up to the convention. It is not simply the Human Rights Act that is at fault, but rather the European convention on human rights and the courts’ willingness to adjudicate on the basis of it that is the problem. We should seek to treat not the symptoms, but the fundamental cause of the problem—the European convention itself.

Does my hon. Friend agree, as regards the accumulation of these principles into European law through the European Court of Justice, that it was the specific intention of the treaty to apply the convention so that it would also fall within the jurisdiction of the European Court, overriding all the laws in this country and applicable in the House of Lords?

My hon. Friend makes a valid point. That matter was not high in my mind, but I thank him for his valuable contribution.

I believe that there are alternative ways in which we can defend individual liberty. Those of us who believe in genuine liberty should be concerned to protect the individual against the overbearing state, but we should not regard the Human Rights Act as a measure that empowers individuals against the state—instead, it hands to unaccountable judges powers that should rightfully rest with accountable parliamentarians through the ballot box. Human rights legislation ossifies the public policy-making process. It prevents us from developing innovative answers to new challenges. It makes an unresponsive state even less responsive. It puts more power in the hands of remote and unaccountable elites. In this country we have a long tradition of individual liberty—a tradition that was not guaranteed by some charter adjudicated on by judges.

There is a growing public perception that human rights legislation, in the shape of the Act and the convention, protects the undeserving—the criminal and the terrorist—at the expense of the law-abiding. That view is largely justified. This criminal rights legislation must be repealed, but we must not merely axe the Act—the European convention on human rights must go as well.

Although I agree with a great deal of the robust analysis put forward by my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich (Mr. Carswell), I should like first to refer to one of the opening remarks in the excellent speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr. Shepherd), who asked why, if this human rights legislation is as rosy a garden as its advocates on the Government and Liberal Democrat Benches would like us to believe, it is necessary for us to have a debate of this sort at all, and why the tone of Members on those Benches is so defensive.

The more the debate went on, the more I became aware of something ticking away at the back of my memory reminding me that I had lived through something similar before, and eventually it dawned on me what it was. My mind went back to those junior common room debates in Balliol college, Oxford—not the most conservative-oriented of Oxford colleges in my day—when I used to engage the Marxist majority along these lines: if communism and Marxism is such a wonderful thing, why is it that whenever one looks at it working in practice the people are oppressed and suppressed, and often not only are denied their human rights but lose their lives? The answer was always: “Well, it’s because the countries that are trying to put Marxism and communism into practice haven’t really understood it, so they misapply it. It’s not that the theory is wrong—it’s just that it hasn’t been tried properly.” That is what I am hearing today in what is being put forward by defenders of this legislation.

It is blindingly obvious that I am not a lawyer of any sort, but I like to think that I know a little bit about common sense. Government and Liberal Democrat supporters of this legislation keep having to say that we must bring common sense to it. When one gets a system or theory that systematically leads to the misunderstanding and misapplication of what it is meant to do, that suggests to me that there is something wrong with the system or theory itself. I believe that to be the case in this situation.

I am not qualified to say whether it is possible to introduce a new Bill of Rights instead of the Human Rights Act, as my party proposes, without also, as my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich suggested, ripping up our allegiance to the European convention on human rights. However, if we are to introduce a Bill of Rights, I should like to make a few suggestions that Conservative Front Benchers and the leadership of my party might bear in mind. I hope that they will find some resonance in wider society, if not on the Government Benches or among Liberal Democrat Members.

First, we should recognise that any Bill of Rights must be a fairly short catalogue. One of the problems that has led to the concept of human rights being discredited by the legislation is that most people rightly believe that, for something to be a human right, it should be fundamental. They do not like to hear that people cite their human rights in cases that are obviously trivial and often perverse.

Secondly, people should recognise that there are few, if any, absolute rights and that most rights are provisional or contingent. We acknowledge that in, for example, times of war, when we impose conscription, which requires our citizens to go to war and put themselves in mortal danger. There are many lower level examples of the fact that the choices that we must make about the way in which we conduct our affairs mean, more often than not, choosing the lesser of two evils. What sticks in the throat about some cases is that, all too often, a human right is declared in an absolutist way, as if, once that is established, it is the end of the matter and its impact on the rights of other people does not count.

Let me revert to my undergraduate days of reading philosophy and politics. It would be useful for those who frame a new Bill of Rights to bear in mind the simple principle that John Stuart Mill spelled out so effectively in his classic essay, “On Liberty”. It is worth reading some of it into the record. It states:

“The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle…That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others… the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to some one else. The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others.”

That is clear. We must ask ourselves whether justice, common sense and the principle of liberty that Mill outlined with so much emphasis and rightful attention, focusing on limiting people’s ability to harm others, has been taken further forward or knocked back by the introduction of human rights legislation.

I believe that people who come to this country without a legal right to do so and proceed to commit grave criminal offences are not in a position morally to claim that they have a right to remain here at the end of their prison sentence, irrespective of the misbehaviour that led them to be imprisoned. It is easy for people to say, “This particular group will be targeted for assassination.” It is not as clear as that in nine cases out of 10. It is usually a question of a risk assessment of some sort.

I believe that I am right—hon. Members must forgive me if I am conflating different cases—to say that one of those currently on the run on suspicion of murdering a female police constable not only got out of the country dressed in a burqa, wisely calculating, I suspect, that he would not be searched to establish whether his disguise was bogus, but has fled to the very country to which, he had previously successfully maintained, it was too dangerous for him to return. That would be funny if there were not a dead policeman lying in a coffin as a result.

I believe in the principle that was enunciated—I am sorry that my repertoire is rather limited to my brief period as a philosophy undergraduate—by the late Sir Karl Popper when he talked about the paradox of tolerance. I have quoted it many times before and I intend, if I am spared, to quote it many times again:

“If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them”.

I fear that the problem with this legislation––the perversity of this legislation, the sub- culture that it has generated––is a culture of tolerating the intolerant and of setting their rights to look after their aims and their abuses over and above the rights of innocent people to be protected from harm. The Government and the Liberal Democrats can convince themselves all they like that this is all about the media misrepresenting cases, and half-educated bureaucrats misapplying the law, or even fully educated bureaucrats gold-plating the law—how often have we heard that given as an excuse in respect of daft European legislation—but the great British public can usually tell when something is working well and when something is working badly. This legislation is working badly. The Government know that it is working badly and the reason they keep prating about the need to inject common sense into it is that it is a body of legislation that is inimical to common sense.

I am grateful to be called, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I indicated to Mr. Speaker that I hoped that I might be, as I was prevented from being here at the beginning because of a long-standing engagement. I apologise to the Minister and to her opposite number on the Conservative Front Bench that I did not hear their contributions, but obviously I will read them tomorrow. I hope that I will not say anything that is in ignorance of what they said, or in any way disrespectful of things that they may have brought to the House.

Unlike the hon. Member for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis), I do not come here as a philosopher or even as a former philosophy student, but as a former human rights lawyer and as one who is absolutely, strongly and unreservedly in favour of the legislation and supportive of the progressive development that the Government brought about when they introduced the Human Rights Act, as the best way that they could see of incorporating the convention into domestic law.

My interest––not formally relevant but so people know––is that, after my call to the Bar, I spent a couple of years as a trainee and then as an employee on human rights matters in the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. That was in the 1970s. Twenty years before, we ratified the convention. At the time, as hon. Members have mentioned, people were beginning to bring cases of individual petition. The ratification after the war, the right of individual petition and lastly the incorporation into domestic law have all been very good developments.

Colleagues have referred to the context. This is one of the legacies of the decision after the war of the great leaders of Europe—Winston Churchill was one and there were equivalent leaders in France, Italy, Germany and elsewhere—to ensure that we never had war again in this continent and that we set a good example. The Council of Europe was one other legacy, as was the transformation of the League of Nations into the United Nations and the convention on human rights. We should be proud of that and proud of the part that the British played in the writing of the document which gave us the human rights that we have written down today.

This has been a developing document. Documents have been much laboured over—for example in the United Nations, as referred to by the hon. Member for Stone (Mr. Cash), where the universal declaration eventually became the UN international covenant on civil and political rights. There is also the European document. Those documents were not frozen in time. They were agreed at the beginning, but, as hon. Members know, they were then supplemented by negotiated protocols to the original document.

The hon. Member for New Forest, East implied that there is far too much legislation. By my calculation, there are only 15 rights in total; they are set out in the convention and all its protocols. Fifteen rights is not far too many; a very limited number of rights are protected. All are rights that most British people would regard as fundamental rights that they would want to be defended. There is the right to life, the prohibition of torture, and the prohibition of slavery, referred to by the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous); we got rid of that 200 years ago, and the convention ensures that we shall not have slavery and forced labour again. There is also the right to liberty and security, the right to a fair trial, the right to freedom of expression, the right to education, the right to family life, and the right not to be discriminated against. Those rights are not alien to us; they are fundamentally central to the citizenry of this country—and the fact that they are written down gives us a much better guarantee that they will be upheld than ever we had before, for reasons I shall come on to discuss.

I take on board the fact that the hon. Gentleman is giving us an historical lesson about the background to the legislation, but we are also talking about its practical ramifications. Is he concerned about the perverse and obscene spectacle of police forces distributing in public mug shots of criminals convicted of very serious offences but the public not being permitted to know what crimes they have been convicted of and human rights being used as the excuse for that?

I have apologised for not being present for the opening speeches of the debate, but I have been present for all of the rest of it; I do not think that the hon. Gentleman has been. If he were well informed, he would know that one reason the debate has become of greater interest to some colleagues is of a misinterpretation of many of the rights set out in the convention. They are rights to which we in this country have subscribed for many years and they are applicable to many in this country. There has been some misunderstanding of the rights, but I hope that this debate will be one of many exercises—along with the Lord Chancellor’s recent speech and other speeches and judicial interpretations—that correct that. I have seen nothing that justifies a decision that pictures could not be shown in the case that the hon. Gentleman refers to.

Let me say clearly to the hon. Gentleman and other Conservative Members that the human rights convention and the legislation is much more about the rights of parents, children, carers, grandparents and husbands and wives who are normal, law-abiding citizens in constituencies around this land, than it is about people who are in prison or who are alleged to have committed serious crimes. It is about the rights of the majority as much as it is about those of the minority. However, if the hon. Gentleman ever thinks that it is not important to protect the rights of the minorities too, I hope that he is never one of those minorities. I hope that he is never arrested unfairly, or that he—or anybody in his family—is never detained wrongly, because if he is he will realise that it is very important that the courts in his county, as in mine, can immediately take an application to grant the liberty of the citizen, which would not otherwise necessarily be granted. I hope that he will think twice about the nationalistic view that these rights are alien to our culture. They are British rights. We drafted them, and thank goodness the European continent as a whole has endorsed them, and thank goodness they are applicable when we step across the channel and visit other countries in Europe. British citizens can pray in aid those rights in other countries, as other people can here. The fact that we are not dependent on the arbitrary whim of a particular Executive, Government or Parliament is a great civilising development.

How can it be civilising for difficulties to be put in the way of the police in searching children in schools for knives and guns?

It is not civilising for difficulties to be put in the way of the police. I live in a borough where, sadly, searching youngsters is necessary as they enter school, because of the terrible tragedies that have occurred; indeed, I have been with the police today. However, the issue is whether we have rights that we uphold. We have always had some rights, which, as the hon. Member for Stone said, were established by habeas corpus, but they have been inadequately defended. The case that my hon. Friend the Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) and I make is that we should never trust Executives, because they always seek to exceed their powers, but nor should we trust Parliament. Parliament is not perfect. It is not representative in gender, background, race, ethnicity, colour or political view, and it does not represent the views of the people of Britain. The Government were not elected by the majority of the people of Britain. [Interruption.] We were elected by the system that we have, but there is no reason for thinking that it gives us a perfect Parliament. We should be much more positive about ensuring that we have independent judges who are fearless and are not seeking their seats at the next election. They should be able to stand up and say that the rights to a fair trial, to freedom of association and to freedom of speech are ones that we defend.

The great merit of the Government’s belated but none the less welcome decision in 1998 to bring, as the hon. Member for Llanelli (Nia Griffith) said, human rights home is that, instead of having to wait—instead of having to go through the magistrates court, the High Court and the Appeal Court, and then to Strasbourg—people can pray in aid their rights in this country at the first occasion. If we are to have human rights, we have to be able to argue for them in the local courts.

We had them here already.

We did, but they could not be invoked fully and finally and adjudicated until one had exhausted the domestic remedies and gone to Strasbourg.

The hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr. Shepherd) said that one problem with the new system is that lots of courts interpret the Human Rights Act, whereas before, only one court finally interpreted the human rights convention. That is true, but we in this country desperately need to have a human rights culture imbued in us all the time. One reason young people in this country do not understand their rights and responsibilities is that, unlike in France or the United States, they do not have a written constitution. They are not brought up to understand the relationship between the state and the individual. That is why we Liberal Democrats and our predecessor Liberal party have for many years wanted not only a Bill of Rights but a written constitution, so that the rights and the responsibilities of the individual can be established and learned by children at their mother’s knee as they go to school, just as they are in the United States. Youngsters in the United States understand the rights and responsibilities of the citizen. They understand the importance of the constitution and the value of a supreme court independent of the Executive and the legislature. That is a great advantage, and we should seek it.

I hope that the Minister heard the request of my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth, South (Mr. Hancock) that the Government look much more favourably at the Council of Europe’s plea to be properly resourced, so that it can deal much more quickly with cases that go to Strasbourg at the end of the process. However, there is one other thing that we in Parliament could do to improve the credibility of human rights in this country. When the Government are thinking of legislating, rather than a Minister certifying on the face of the draft Bill that it is human rights-compliant, it should be submitted to the Joint Committee on Human Rights, to which I pay tribute for the very good service that it does to both Houses. The Committee should certify that it is human rights-compliant on behalf of both Houses and of all parties represented in this Parliament. I would far rather trust a representative group of people not in government to tell me that proposed legislation is complaint with human rights, than a Minister who has an interest in getting legislation through.

Sometimes people say that the convention does not allow us to protect our national security and, indeed, that argument was made by the hon. Member for Harwich (Mr. Carswell). How wrong he is. All but a handful of the 15 rights set out in the convention may be qualified in times of threats to national security. There are very few absolute rights, as nations may derogate at such times. There is an absolute right not to be subjected to torture and thank God for that. But other rights, such as the right to respect for private and family life in article 8, are qualified as follows:

“There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.”

The convention was intelligently drafted to allow us to row back from absolute rights in the interests of national security. I commend the convention to the hon. Gentleman, and if he reads it carefully he will see that I am right. Some of the protections that he seeks are guaranteed in writing already. He is on record as saying that he did not want people to be deported to a country where they would be executed. That is why some rights are absolute and unqualified.

I am proud that we have this strong convention. I hope that the Government are resolute and stand firm on this issue, and do not wobble again. I also hope that the Conservative party, as it works out its thinking on this, will be clear that if we are to have a domestic Bill of Rights, it should start with the European convention and the 15 rights in it. If we build on that and seek a consensus, we could end up with a document that would be as valuable in the 21st century as Magna Carta has been in past centuries.

It has been an interesting debate, although some of the contributions have convinced me that we set about our campaign better to inform the public and others about the HRA and what it stands for not a day too soon. It is a matter of common sense, but that point does not seem to have got across to very many hon. Members tonight.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore), the chairman of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, on the breadth of his knowledge and wisdom on this topic. I also congratulate him on his diligence in pursuing the point about a public authority, with which I have much sympathy. When I was a member of the Committee before him, I helped to initiate the first inquiry into that issue. It is a cause of concern that when the Act was passed it was intended that there should be a functional definition of what a public authority was, so that if a public function were delivered by a private body it would be subject to the rights in the HRA. It is interpretation by the court that has moved us away from that position and my hon. Friend is to be complimented on pursuing the issue. The Government are making every effort to help and we have twice intervened in cases to point them in the direction that we think they should go. We await a decision by the House of Lords on one such intervention. It is a poor substitute, but there is little doubt that human rights can be enforced through the third party, which is the public procurer of the services. My hon. Friend made some good points and has been diligent in his pursuit.

The hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) comes on a bit strong in my opinion when he talks about half-witted bureaucrats who are one law book short of a law library. However, I am pleased that he agrees with me that the press reporting has not helped to clarify the human rights situation. Indeed, the press reporting is considerably to blame. The best human rights myth story was picked up by a newspaper in my neck of the woods and it concerned whether the need to drag one’s wheelie bin down to the end of the drive every Friday constituted forced labour. [Laughter.] However, the hon. Gentleman is right and I think he supports us in trying to drive home a better understanding than that and, I am sure he would agree, a better understanding than was exhibited by many Conservative Members tonight.

My hon. Friend the Member for Llanelli (Nia Griffith) also raised the public authority issue. She would go further than the Act and trace human rights responsibility all the way to the ultimate recipient of any public money. That seems a strong line to take, but I was extremely captivated by her idea that there should be inspirational teachers of human rights so that we might inspire the next generation of children to understand them more quickly.

I apologise to my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon for not dealing with the question about full publication of the review. I understand that Baroness Scotland wrote to the Committee in November 2006 saying that the conclusions generated by the review were published as part of “Rebalancing the Criminal Justice System” in July 2006 and that that publication, along with the DCA’s review, fully encapsulates the Home Office findings and properly represents the Government’s position.

Will my hon. and learned Friend give way?

I am happy to give way to my hon. Friend, but I assure him that I can add nothing to what Baroness Scotland said.

Ultimately, the statement to which my hon. and learned Friend refers was self-serving. Only by checking the basis of the review can we establish whether there is a factual basis for the assertion in the subsequent document that there is a risk-averse culture in the Home Office. Simply saying so does not make it so; one needs to be able to test the evidence, and that we have been unable to do.

I understand my hon. Friend’s logic, but as I said, I cannot take the matter further.

The hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr. Shepherd) has huge respect for our freedoms and I have huge respect for him, not least as a former colleague on the Joint Committee on Human Rights. However, I fear that he is too convinced that because we are democratically voted into Parliament we will decide everything correctly for the public good, and that people can always be confident that because we have been voted in we shall be able to preserve everybody’s individual rights all the way through, so they need no further empowerment because they have us. I do not agree. People require empowerment and a means—whether international or not—to implement their rights themselves. I am sorry that the hon. Gentleman’s love of democracy does not make him understand that we need to deepen it in exactly that way.

I am sure that is a genuine misunderstanding of the position I was adopting. In fact, I said that I supported declarations of incompatibility under the existing law because of the inadequacies of this place, which has become Executive-dominated to such an extent that it is no longer the custodian of our traditional liberties.

I admire the way in which the hon. Gentleman engages so relentlessly and comprehensively with these issues. My view is that human rights legislation deepens democracy and does not diminish it in any way.

The hon. Member for Stone (Mr. Cash) described pre-legislative scrutiny for human rights—that is, the human rights-proofing of legislation—as undemocratic. No, it is not. A Minister introducing a Bill is required to inform Parliament that in his or her opinion a Bill is not incompatible with convention rights and it is then for Parliament to decide whether he or she is right and whether the Bill should be enacted.

The hon. Member for Portsmouth, South (Mr. Hancock) raised the issue of public authority, and I hope that I have already dealt with our position on that. We tried to intervene twice in cases to clarify the point. He, too, seems to suggest that tracing public cash from a public source right through to the ultimate recipient is the way to depict that the recipient must be a public authority. That seems to go a long way. He asked why we did not publish the strategic review commissioned by Sir Hayden Phillips. The reason is that although it gave us a picture of the situation in 2004, things had moved on considerably by 2006, so it is not such a useful depiction as he suggests.

The hon. Gentleman repeated his main question in an intervention on me and in his speech, and it was about how the Department for Constitutional Affairs would drive the agenda through. All central Government Departments have been offered the new guidance, and there is printed guidance and guidance on the website. Most Departments have received many copies of the guidance, and I am reliably informed that 43,000 copies have already been distributed, although I do not know who has counted them. Each local authority across England and Wales has had six handbooks, 12 summaries and lots more have been ordered. Every police constabulary, every probation service and every youth offending team in England and Wales has received all the guidance. As I said in my opening speech, it is the Lord Chancellor’s intention that he should meet representative bodies to push the agenda forward and he intends that all his Ministers will do similarly. I hope therefore that I have satisfied the hon. Gentleman that there is a real intention to promote the issue.

The hon. Gentleman asked why we could not give more funding to the European Court and the Council of Europe, which are strapped for cash. It is correct that the European Court is suffering a huge backlog, but the problems are systemic. For example, it receives a huge number of inadmissible and repetitive claims and the court’s problems cannot really be addressed by further injections of cash, at least not on their own. That is not the answer. Protocol 14 to the ECHR is designed to address the systemic problems of the court and to try to clear the backlog. The hon. Gentleman questioned why we would not give the court more cash, but it is our intention that it should function fully. We have strongly supported protocol 14 with that intention.

The hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) champions the freedom of conscience for Christians. He is a former Back-Bench colleague on a Committee and I enjoyed his conversation then as I enjoyed his contribution now as, in a sense, he engaged in a different debate. There is nothing inconsistent between the values of the ECHR and Christianity, and there is nothing in the ECHR that reduces the freedom of conscience for Christians or gives them less value than the freedom of conscience for other people. There is nothing that prevents Christian motivation from doing public good and I know that he will agree that the motivation to do good is desirable whether it comes from Christians, humanists or atheists. When he considers, as he did, what values we could collect around to unify people in this country, the values implicit in the Human Rights Act give us a perfect target around which we could marshal ourselves.

The hon. Member for Harwich (Mr. Carswell) would take us back to pre-war days to stop us being influenced by what he called “some charter”. I can agree with only one point that he made: our human rights culture has been a tad vague. We intend, as I have said, to sharpen it up.

That brings me to the contribution of the hon. Member for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis), who spoke of needing a schedule of rights that was, in effect, a short list made up of a few absolute rights and in which all the rest were provisional. That is exactly what we have got. The ECHR is a short list of rights, only a few of which, such as those against torture, slavery and retrospective penalties, are absolute. Most of the rest are limited, such as that on the right to family life, or qualified, such as the fact that the right to freedom of speech must be balanced against other people’s rights. I am very glad to be able to grant the hon. Gentleman’s wish this evening. I must say that I enjoyed his discursion on Popper. I used to have a dog called Poppy, and one or two friends thought I was so pretentious that the dog was actually called Popper.

The hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) is undoubtedly a supporter of human rights. He raised the same point about the Council of Europe, and I hope that I have dealt with it satisfactorily. He suggested that the JCHR should take responsibility for declaring whether a draft Bill was compatible with convention rights. I do not agree. If I am putting forward a Bill as a Minister, it is my responsibility to say whether, in my view, it is compatible. That must be done as early as possible so that the JCHR can, as it regularly does, report, comment and inform debate in the House. It is a good idea for the declaration of compatibility to have reasoning attached to it so as to help the Committee with its task.

I agree that it is important to get involved at a much earlier stage and we are, in fact, trying to provide earlier scrutiny of White and Green Papers, for example. One of the real difficulties that we experience in scrutinising Bills is the lack of information from Ministers. Does my hon. and learned Friend agree that it would be helpful if we had a human rights memorandum, summarising the advice—not necessarily the full argument, but the advice and the reasoning behind it—of the Attorney-General on whether a Bill is compliant? That would narrow the amount of work that we had to do, lessen the work and correspondence that needs to be carried out between my Committee and Ministers and also, of course, rather better inform the House.

I could not argue against my hon. Friend because I argued with him when I was on the Joint Committee on Human Rights.

I am pleased that the Minister has accepted the logic of the suggestion made by the hon. Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore). Having more information about the Government’s thinking on these issues at an earlier stage is enormously helpful. In that context, will the Minister also consider recertification following amendment? As she knows, Bills often have huge swathes of major amendment—often with whole new sections brought in—so certification at the point of that proposition being considered by a Committee would also be helpful.

The hon. Gentleman makes a very powerful point.

That leads me to the hon. Member for North-West Norfolk (Mr. Bellingham), who speaks for Her Majesty’s Opposition on this issue and who is concerned that the Human Rights Act 1998 has been undermining the criminal law. In particular, he talked about the Assets Recovery Agency and complained that it was challenged in court when it attempted to seize the assets of criminals. I am afraid that when the hon. Gentleman argues in that way, he is really arguing against due process and I have to tell him that it is far better—particularly if these challenges are, as he heavily implied, absolutely without merit—if the challenge is made here, where it can be done relatively quickly and relatively cheaply and there can be an outcome. That is preferable to going to Strasbourg, which is what would have to happen if, as he wishes, we did not have the Human Rights Act.

Indeed, with great respect to the hon. Member for North-West Norfolk, he seemed completely unable to grasp that what will always remain is the European convention on human rights. He, unlike some of his colleagues, has no intention of leaving it behind, but it is impossible to introduce a Bill of Rights that will oust it. The hon. Gentleman talked about the margin of appreciation as if it would somehow emerge if there were a British Bill of Rights. Marginal appreciation, of course, already exists now and it means a tolerance in respect of local circumstances if they are likely to be better known to the national decision maker on the detail of each individual case. It would not permit the European Court to tolerate alternative Bills of Rights, which are bound to be in conflict with or different from the convention. There would no point in having a different Bill of Rights if it were not different from the convention.

The hon. Gentleman’s point, I assume, is for it to be different in some magical way; but despite my direct question, he could not tell me what would be in it. Obviously, it is going to be different from what we have now, so it is obviously going to be different from the convention rights. What would happen, of course, is the opposite of what he said. We would not recover total supremacy for law to the House of Commons; on the contrary, the only point of having a British Bill of Rights would be if it were entrenched here; otherwise, it would have no effect. That means that we would lose parliamentary sovereignty and the supremacy of the elected House of Commons. On questions of rights, the ultimate arbiters would be the judiciary and future Parliaments might be unable to act to protect national security. The present Human Rights Act avoids that. It allows Acts of Parliament to become law even if they are not compatible with the European convention.

The second difficulty is the uncertainty and confusion that would result from having two sets of fundamental rights. On the one hand, the Government would remain obliged to comply with the European convention rights and the citizen would be able to take a case to Strasbourg; on the other hand, Government, citizens and courts would be confronted by a separate, but presumably overlapping, set of rights for the purposes of domestic law. Much criticism of bureaucrats has been made, but I cannot think of a better recipe for confusion than having several layers of different rights. Decision makers would have to bear in mind two sets of rights, so they would inevitably become more risk-averse. Our task is to empower through this legislation; how on earth would the decision makers cope with such a lot of overlapping rights?

To be quite frank, there has been a lot of guff talked tonight from the Opposition Benches. It makes it absolutely critical that our campaign should be a success, that it should start soon and that it should be driven forward. We must disclose to Opposition Members the common sense that is an inherent part of this legislation, which they are clearly totally missing.

I am proud to be a member of the Government, even though only a lance corporal, who brought home these rights. I am determined, with my fellow Ministers, to encourage these rights into our culture. I look forward very strongly to the advent of the commission on equalities and human rights. It is a rather chancy, patchy way to entrench rights to have a Department pushing them, when they are essentially forwarded through the courts. It will be much better when we have a commission that can drive them forward, so that they become part of our core, mainstream values and part of the way public authorities deal with all our citizens all the time.

The alternative is the Cameron Bill of Rights, which was referred to by a most distinguished journalist, whom I do not always agree with, but I do on this occasion—

The Minister agrees with the media when it suits her to do so.

The hon. Gentleman should wait for it. The Bill of Rights was referred to as

“so woolly it would make a flock of Merino ewes bleat with envy.”

I agree. I commend the current Human Rights Act and this campaign, which will bring it further home.

I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.

Motion, by leave, withdrawn.