My Lords, as we mark the 75th anniversary of the European Convention on Human Rights, I thank my noble friends on the Cross Benches for selecting the Motion and express my gratitude to the many distinguished Members from all parts of your Lordships’ House who are participating in this debate. I also thank the Library and the many organisations which have sent briefing material, from the Law Society to the International Bar Association to Policy Exchange.
The Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard said:
“Life must be understood backwards; but … it must be lived forwards”.
Following Kierkegaard’s advice, I will begin by looking back and recalling the convention’s genesis and achievements, and then I will say something about its future.
In 2013, I opened another Cross-Bench debate marking the 65th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, recalling that it grew out of the egregious disregard and contempt for human rights that had resulted in barbarous acts and outraged the conscience of mankind. Eleanor Roosevelt, a key figure in crafting the 1948 universal declaration, described it as a “Magna Carta for all” people. It helped to inspire the European convention; both are foundation stones intended to be for all people and not available for selective enforcement according to culture, tradition or convenience. They should be seen as much as a declaration of human dignity as a declaration of human rights.
In the aftermath of the two world wars, which both began in Europe and which claimed the lives of some 77 million people—and in the same continent where another war rages today—a formidable array of political leaders showed extraordinary zeal and exemplary commitment in creating architecture to uphold the rule of law. Intrinsic to that were international covenants, many of which focused on human rights. In 1946, those barbarous acts which had outraged the conscience of the world prompted Winston Churchill to set out the case for a new international order based on the rule of law and human rights. Outraged consciences led to practical actions.
Lawyers such as Raphael Lemkin, 49 of whose relatives were murdered in the Holocaust, bequeathed the 1948 genocide convention, while Sir Hersch Lauterpacht developed the legal concept of crimes against humanity. At Nuremberg, Lauterpacht helped draft the speech of the British prosecutor Hartley Shawcross—the Labour Member of Parliament for St Helens and later Lord Shawcross—who in turn collaborated with Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, the Conservative Member of Parliament for Liverpool West Derby and later the first Earl of Kilmuir—in the prosecution of Nazi war crimes after World War II. He played a significant role too in drafting the European Convention on Human Rights.
The agenda had been set in Missouri, by Winston Churchill in March 1946, where, flanked by President Truman, he famously remarked that an iron curtain had descended across Europe. He insisted:
My Lords, I declare interests as the author of the Penguin Allen Lane book Human Rights: The Case for the Defence, as a new member of our delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and as a lifelong human rights lawyer and campaigner. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Alton, on his well-deserved appointment as chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights and on that outstanding opening of his debate marking the 75th Anniversary of the convention which protects the civil rights of around 700 million people in 46 states.
I have been working with the convention on an almost daily basis for around 30 of those years, both for and against UK Governments domestically and in the Strasbourg court that has rendered it perhaps the most effective international human rights mechanism in the world. Most formatively, I was a government lawyer in the late 1990s during the passage and implementation of our Human Rights Act and at Liberty, the National Council for Civil Liberties, from 2001 until 2016.
We have been eloquently reminded of the history of why Conservative politician, jurist and Nuremberg prosecutor David Maxwell Fyfe was deputed to lead the convention drafting process after the Council of Europe was founded by the Treaty of London in 1949. If there was ever any doubt about the direct relationship between justice and peace, the 1930s had ended it. This was especially so in Europe, where two, too proximate world wars had begun. It could be no surprise that those seeking to rebuild the lands of Milton, Molière, Mozart and Michelangelo should have made co-operating around human rights enforcement a priority. If we have sometimes been a little complacent in the intervening years, surely that is over now, as war and far-rightism once more stalk Europe, and respect for the rule of law is far from secure, even in that great old constitutional democracy across the Atlantic.
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for whom I have an enormously high regard, on securing this debate and his introduction to it. It is a paradox that defenders of the supranational European Court of Human Rights invariably begin with an appeal to British chauvinism laced with deference to Conservative icons by invoking the creation myth. That goes as follows: “The ECHR was a British invention, inspired by Churchill, drafted by Maxwell Fyfe, which codified historic British rights. Since we were the first country to ratify it, it must have been eagerly endorsed by us”.
That is almost entirely false. Attlee’s Government ratified the convention with great reluctance and only on condition that the future European court would have no jurisdiction in the UK since British people would not be allowed to take cases to the court. They also treated the convention as non-binding, deliberately not altering laws known to be incompatible with it. Moreover, when Churchill returned to No. 10 a few months later with Maxwell Fyfe, then Lord Kilmuir, as his Lord Chancellor, despite some ambiguous enthusiasm for it when in opposition, he adopted exactly the same position as Attlee, as did subsequent Conservative Prime Ministers—not allowing the court jurisdiction in the UK.
The second myth about the ECHR was that it simply codified British rights which had evolved over centuries. If that was all it did, British membership would confer little benefit and leaving would be no loss. This myth implies that few British laws would be incompatible with the convention. If only. Judgments have been made in 567 cases and the UK found to be in violation in one or more respects in no fewer than 329 of them by the Strasbourg court. In addition, the court has decided over 25,000 British cases by rejecting them or declaring the vast majority inadmissible, but after enriching the lawyers. That would be no surprise to those advising Attlee’s Government, who warned that allowing recourse to Strasbourg would provide
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Alton, on his excellent opening to this very important debate.
When Ernest Davies, the Member of Parliament, signed the convention on behalf of the Labour Government in 1950, in Rome, he was not carving a monument in stone; he was putting his name to a dynamic and living convention. There were 15 signatories and now there are 46, excluding only Belarus and Russia in the European context.
The guide to the European court puts it this way:
“By its case-law the Court has extended the rights set out in the Convention so that its provisions apply today to situations that were totally unforeseeable and unimaginable at the time it was first adopted … new technologies, bioethics … the environment. The Convention also applies to societal or sensitive questions relating … to terrorism or migration … abortion, assisted suicide, body searches, domestic slavery, adoption by homosexuals, the wearing of religious symbols … the protection of journalists’ sources, or the retention of DNA data”.
What happens where there is no European convention?
Last week, in the United States, hundreds of Venezuelans were shipped to El Salvador. They were treated in an inhuman and degrading manner that would contravene Article 3 of the European convention. They were shackled, contravening Article 5, without any form of trial, contravening Article 6, and with no ability to complain to a court of the violation of their rights, contravening Article 13. The USA is a country which bows the knee to Magna Carta and the rule of law, but the US federal judge who sought to block this move has been ignored. “Oopsie, too late!”, said the President of El Salvador, pocketing the millions of dollars paid to his country.
Where have we seen this behaviour before? In Nazi Germany, the crimes of which motivated European countries to come together to sign the convention. There is a suggestion by the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, and others that the UK should withdraw and write its own, presumably on the Trumpian model.
My Lords, I too add my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for bringing this debate and for his speech. I am not going to explore the legal implications, but want to make a few theological points, if I may. I want to comment on the origins of the spring from which these ideas first came, how it developed into a stream and then a river, and how still today our understanding of rights and responsibilities is developing.
The noble Lord, Lord Lilley, is right. It goes back to those early chapters of Genesis. In fact, you could go back to the Code of Hammurabi, 1,700 years before Christ, but let us go back to the Ten Commandments, where we find the creation narratives where humankind is created in God’s image. It is about the inherent dignity that belongs to each and every person, not dependent on sex, wealth, education or any other differentiation. This is implied in the Ten Commandments and is developed further in passages such as Deuteronomy 10, where God defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow and loves the stranger in the land. It is why the prophet Isaiah urges the people of God to seek justice, correct oppression, defend the fatherless and plead for the widow.
However, as Jonathan Sacks, a former Member of your Lordships’ House, was keen to point out, rights are things we claim and duties are things we perform. In other words, duties, he said, are rights translated from the passive to the active mode. The biblical teaching in the New Testament reaches its fullest expression in this reciprocity in human relating, expressed by Jesus in this way: love the lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind, and love your neighbour as yourself.
Nowhere in the scriptures do we find the phrase human rights—and certainly no reference to the ECHR. Indeed, some theologians, such as the eminent Alasdair MacIntyre, have argued that human rights are actually a fiction; he simply did not agree with them as a concept. Others, including a former Member of this House, Lord Williams of Oystermouth, disagreed, saying that the fundamental theological point
My Lords, as your Lordships will know—I am sure the right reverend Prelate, whom it is a pleasure to follow, will know—in George Orwell’s 1984, the three great regional powers of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia confront each other with constantly shifting alliances. Why those alliances shift is never clear, but it is the people and their human rights who suffer. Today, there is a fourth great power in the world; not only the United States, Europe—in a rather different form from the others—and Russia, but China too, watching and no doubt considering its options for Taiwan. One cannot push analogies too far, but we now live in a world of great power machismo, where international co-operation and international agreements are too often flouted. But it is precisely at times like these that they are so needed, and why it is right to focus now on the European Convention on Human Rights.
Too often, Europe, which we like to think of as civilised, has experienced the abuse of human rights: in Ukraine today, in the aftermath of Russia’s wholly unjustified and unjustifiable invasion; in Bosnia; in Serbia; in Kosovo more than 20 years ago; and in the chaos and anarchy of eastern Europe after the Second World War, brilliantly evoked in the books of Primo Levi. It is a tribute to the ECHR that more than 40 countries, with Russia of course expelled, are now its members and have accepted the international legal obligation to protect human rights, in our case through the implementation of the Human Rights Act.
Of course the ECHR is not perfect. Of course some member states fail to observe all their obligations under it. But Europe and, through Europe’s example, other parts of the world are the better for it. As an original signatory, Britain gained respect and influence. That must remain the case so that Britain, as a constructive and active member, can help to realise the ECHR’s principles. I do not favour withdrawal from the ECHR. I believe in exercising our influence for good within it. I am glad that the Prime Minister has said that the Government are unequivocally committed to the ECHR. I hope that the Minister will repeat that commitment today.
My Lords, I declare that I am a practitioner at the English Bar and the president of the council of Justice, a leading British law organisation. I am the director of the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute, an honorary Writer to the Signet in Scotland and, as your Lordships heard earlier, I am currently working for President Zelensky, heading up with his chef de cabinet a task force to get the children back from Russia. I have been working on that for a number of years with the Yale observatory and other bodies.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Alton. We owe him a debt of gratitude in this House for his constant reminders of our common humanity. He is tireless in his work on the abuses that happen around the world, so it is no surprise that he is speaking here in protection of the values of the European Convention on Human Rights. It amazes me that the very same people who fought tooth and nail to take us out of the European Union—a step which has been ruinous for the economy of this country—are still seeking to sever ties with our European neighbours, especially when it is clear that we have to retain our bonds of connection with Europe and European nations in the face of grievous threats from Russia.
Withdrawal from the ECHR would be disastrous. The Human Rights Act has enriched our law enormously, and it has been especially productive for women. I say that as someone who has been very much on the front line in cases concerning the rights of women. You have only to think about the case of Worboys, where it was possible to use the ECHR before the courts to make sure that rape was properly recognised in prosecutions. Vulnerable victims of domestic violence have received better protection because of the Human Rights Act. There is also the ending of the ban of gay people in the Army, the inquiry into the sex abuse of women in the Army, the better protection of children against corporal punishment and sexual abuse, the greater protection of the media, the ending of detention without trial at the beginning of the 21st century, the prevention of torture from other countries being used and evidenced in our courts, and the protection of religious freedom. The list is enormous. It has also been vital in the Northern Ireland peace process.
My Lords, while congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Alton, on securing this debate, I begin by paying tribute, as he and others have done, to one of the ECHR founders and drafters in the 1950s, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe—later Viscount Kilmuir from 1954 to 1962 and Lord Chancellor here under Churchill, Eden and Macmillan—who earlier on at the Nuremberg trials, through his fair-minded skill and clarity as a prosecuting counsel, played an enormous part in enabling the German public to understand and accept the guilt of their leaders for crimes against humanity, his cross-examination of Hermann Göring becoming one of the most noted in history.
I join with your Lordships in giving huge thanks for the ECHR, whose 75th anniversary we now commemorate; for the extent to which it has not only healed wounds but with balanced purpose, as implied by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans, reinvigorated the heart, mind and soul of Europe; yet furthermore, for its success in providing soft power, direction and stability well beyond Europe and throughout the world; thus with efficacy accomplishing what was intended of it in the first place, as expressed by Maxwell Fyfe in Strasbourg in August 1949, and I quote:
“We cannot let the matter rest at a declaration of moral principles and pious aspirations, excellent though the latter may be. There must be a binding convention”.
In my remarks today, I will briefly touch on three aspects: the scope for the United Kingdom to achieve results through the Council of Europe; education as a human right; and the practicalities of its delivery.
During the progress of the Data (Use and Access) Bill, your Lordships will recall that this House voted to protect private copyright under Council of Europe standards, yet in which regard we can still proudly reflect that the present copyright protection ECHR conventions are precedented and inspired by the United Kingdom in 1710, three years after the 1707 Act of Union, through the Statute of Anne, which granted publishers of books legal protection.
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“We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man”.
Two years later, speaking in The Hague, he presided at a grand congress of 800 delegates and said:
“In the centre of our movement stands the idea of a Charter of Human Rights, guarded by freedom and sustained by law”.
The congress issued a message to Europeans calling for a charter of human rights and
“a Court of Justice with adequate sanctions for the implementation of this Charter”,
leading, in 1950, to 15 European nations signing the convention, with Britain the first to ratify it in 1951.
The text was crafted largely by a team of Oxford and Cambridge professors headed by Maxwell Fyfe. Other British politicians involved in the drafting of the ECHR included Harold Macmillan, Samuel Hoare and Ernest Bevin. The signatories described their convention as a mechanism for
“enforcement of certain of the rights stated in the Universal Declaration”.
Churchill wanted
“moral concepts … able to win the respect and recognition of mankind”,
urging lawmakers:
“Let there be justice, mercy, and freedom”.
Churchill envisaged a Strasbourg court before which violations
“in our own body of … nations might be brought to the judgment of the civilised world”.
In a ringing endorsement, the Daily Telegraph said the convention was
“the turning point when the free peoples of Europe rejected enslavement in the communist system and defeated all attempts to poison and destroy their democratic traditions from within”.
The Times described it as
“a crucial step towards safeguarding fundamental freedoms and promoting a common European heritage of justice and the rule of law”.
The convention has created a common legal space for over 700 million citizens, prohibiting, among other things, torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, slavery and forced labour, and arbitrary or unlawful detention. Its 14 articles protect basic rights, from the right to life to the rights to privacy, conscience and religion, freedom of expression, a fair trial, family life, and more.
The UK subsequently ratified protocols to the convention on the abolition of the death penalty in all circumstances, and three additional rights: the right to free enjoyment of property, the right to education and the right to free and fair elections. Parties to the convention undertake to secure convention rights and freedoms to everyone within their jurisdiction, underpinned by the creation of the European Court of Human Rights, which deals with individual and interstate relations.
During the years following its creation, the convention commanded widespread cross-party support. Lord Chancellors such as Viscount Hailsham described it as part of the
“armoury of weapons against elective dictatorship”.
Another Member of your Lordships’ House, the noble Lord, Lord Clarke of Nottingham, said that pulling out of the convention was “xenophobic and legal nonsense”. On the Liberal SDP benches, notably Lords Wade, Grimond and Jenkins of Hillhead, and Baroness Williams of Crosby were lifelong supporters of the ECHR.
Margaret Thatcher declared that the UK was
“committed to, and supported, the principles of human rights”.—[Official Report, Commons, 6/7/1989; col. 252.]
in the ECHR. Sir John Major reiterated this commitment, and in 1998, Tony Blair incorporated the rights and liberties enshrined in the convention in the Human Rights Act. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg, told this House that the Act
“does not create new human rights or take any existing human rights away. It provides better and easier access to rights which already exist”.—[Official Report, 5/2/1998; col. 755.]
The 1998 Act was described simply as “bringing rights home”. Beyond our home, the ECHR provides reassurance to everyone living and travelling in the Council of Europe area, that we share similar, enforceable human rights standards.
Notwithstanding recent calls to leave the ECHR, last November, this Government said they remained “fully committed” to the ECHR and to
“the important role that multilateral organisations like the Council of Europe play in upholding it”.
Of course, the Council of Europe pre-dates the European Union and has no connection to it. Some 19 member states of the Council of Europe, including the United Kingdom, are not members of the European Union; Russia was expelled because of its illegal invasion of Ukraine.
The ECHR and the Council of Europe are inextricably bound together. Leaving the convention clearly means leaving the Council of Europe. Sir Jonathan Jones KC, a former Treasury solicitor and Permanent Secretary of the Government Legal Department, says that ECHR withdrawal would
“involve leaving the Council of Europe, which is responsible for the convention”.
A resolution of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe states that
“accession to the Council of Europe must go together with becoming a party to the European Convention on Human Rights”,
while the European Court of Human Rights insists:
“Today more than ever the Convention is the cornerstone of the Council of Europe, and any State wishing to become a member of the organisation must sign and ratify it”.
Last month, Theodoros Rousopoulos, the current president of the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly, gave a Lord Speaker’s Lecture. We heard him pay tribute to the commitment and high-level contribution of the United Kingdom parliamentary delegation led by the noble Lord, Lord Touhig. To those who today will demand that we leave the ECHR, and therefore the Council of Europe, I would simply ask them to tell us which rights in the convention they object to. Do we really want to join Belarus and Russia as the only countries not part of any pan-European body?
In 2001, Parliament created the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which I have the honour to chair—although today, I speak for myself and not the committee. The committee has a remit to examine matters relating to human rights in the UK and it has functioned historically as a champion for convention rights.
The JCHR pays close attention to the cases before the European court, the judges of which are elected by the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly. We have noted the role of the convention and the court; for example, in ending the ban on gay people in the military, and homosexual criminalisation in Northern Ireland; in prohibiting the retention for life of DNA samples of innocent people; on indiscriminate phone tapping; on the plight of the Sunday Times, which was prohibited from publishing information about thalidomide; on the protection of vulnerable victims of domestic violence; on the combating of racism; and on the degrading punishment of a teenager in the Isle of Man.
Among our current JCHR inquiries, we are examining the failure to prosecute UK nationals who took part in the genocide in Iraq, and transnational repression and forced labour in supply chains. Previous inquiries have included reform of the Human Rights Act and the right to family life. Last week, we held a round table on the Mental Health Bill, where we heard stories of detention and incarceration. Earlier this week, I met Volker Türk, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, to discuss what we actually mean by human rights and how deeply they are connected to the laws we proclaim, the conventions we have signed, and the traditions of liberty and freedom represented by this place. The European Convention on Human Rights is an essential part of that tradition. Malcolm Bishop KC, writing in the New Law Journal, says that
“the Convention is now firmly embedded in the common law and an impressive corpus of jurisprudence has emerged, which, in my opinion, has made this country a better place”.
I agree.
To its detractors, and for the record, in 2024 the court gave just two judgments on the merits of cases involving the United Kingdom. A violation was found in one case and no violation was found in the other. In a commentary earlier this week, Joshua Rozenberg forensically addressed the caricatures and misattributions which are often wrongly laid at the door of the ECHR. By population, the UK has the lowest number of applications of all member states: three per million people, while for all states combined it was 47.4 per million. Of course, the reason there are so few UK cases is that we broadly obey the ECHR.
Those who want to reduce UK legal standards—some even want to tear up the Human Rights Act—would vandalise our constitutional settlement. This and leaving the convention in a fit of pique, rather than engaging with and reforming it, is not worthy of this country or those who entrusted this extraordinary legacy to us.
At the outset, I recalled Kierkegaard’s thought that life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards. Institutions and conventions are not set in stone. There is always scope for political debate and greater definition of the respective roles of parliaments and judges around controversial issues such as border control, which the JCHR will examine. However, to throw away all the gains would make no sense and merely play into the hands of dictators and enemies of democracy. We are experiencing war in Europe, along with contempt and disregard for international law and institutions, including despicable attacks on the International Criminal Court. We see the rise of autocracies with global reach, even with reach into the UK through transnational repression by hostile states. Rights and freedoms are under assault from within and without.
In this context, we are therefore right to recall the spirit which, 75 years ago, animated remarkable leaders. We are entitled to have pride in the significant British contribution to creating both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights and genuine pride in the development of human rights, international law and the protection of fundamental rights and freedoms. To defend this legacy, we must become far more robust in the public domain—in our schools and universities—in setting out the patriotic case for these shared fundamental values.
In this 75th anniversary year of the European Convention on Human Rights, we are entitled to look back on what was achieved in the ruins of Europe and out of the ashes of Auschwitz. We must insist that those concerns remain vitally relevant to this day and that they are crucial to our future. I beg to move.
In any event, I can report, first hand, the many ways in which the convention has come to the aid of people in the United Kingdom where both their common law and legislators had previously failed them. Before Strasbourg’s intervention, victims of rape were subjected to days of degrading cross-examination in person by their alleged assailants, contrary to Article 3. Similarly, abusive parents who beat their children to a pulp could be acquitted of the grave offence of causing grievous bodily harm by deploying the defence of reasonable chastisement of a child. Indeed, I would go as far as suggesting that victims of crime may be among those who have most benefited from the convention’s effect upon our domestic law, before and since the Human Rights Act 1998 brought rights home to be directly enforceable here.
There are numerous examples too of the UK’s privacy, free speech, non-discrimination and other vital rights and freedoms being ensured and enhanced by the convention. It would be far from liberal or progressive, and certainly deeply unconservative, not to treasure it.
“a small paradise for some lawyers”—
now among its most enthusiastic supporters. In the immigration and asylum tribunals alone, human rights cases were 40% of the 350,000 cases received over the last eight years. To say it has no impact within the UK is an absurdity.
The original purpose of the European court was not to fine-tune each country’s statute book but to protect fundamental freedoms, from torture, slavery, arbitrary arrest et cetera. The third myth is that the court has succeeded in this objective. It was always unrealistic to imagine that any regime which was prepared to use torture, slavery or arbitrary arrest would be put off by the prospect of an adverse ruling by a foreign court. In practice, whenever an authoritarian regime has come to power, adherence to the ECHR has not dissuaded it from trampling on human rights. When the Greek colonels faced an ECHR ruling about the use of torture, Greece simply withdrew from the convention. Russia was expelled for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, not for its rampant domestic human rights violations. Belarus abandoned its observer status rather than implement convention rights. Both Azerbaijan and Turkey have gone pretty far down the road to authoritarian regimes while still remaining in the convention. It is little known, but one reason that France did not even ratify the convention until 1974 was that it was aware of the use of torture and other abuses of human rights during the war in Algeria and had other reasons afterwards for remaining outside. Indeed, it did not allow its citizens to take cases to Strasbourg until 1981 but suffered little opprobrium for that.
The claim that if Britain left it would be joining Belarus and Russia is puerile. We would be joining other common-law countries, including democracies such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada, which uphold human rights without relying on a supranational court. Like them, we would make our laws democratically, not hand over the right to make laws to an international court, giving it the power to legislate rather than enforce the law.
There is good news. The Human Rights Act came into force in the year 2000. Since then, there have been 245 judgments against the UK, finding at least one violation of the convention. But the number of cases has steadily declined, from 18 per year at the beginning to just two in 2022. The number of applications, as the noble Lord, Lord Alton, pointed out, against the UK is now the lowest per capita of all European states. We have succeeded in bringing the convention home, as the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, pointed out, so that our own courts can and do apply its provisions in appropriate cases.
There are three reasons. First, the Human Rights Act creates a legal obligation for all public bodies, including the police, hospitals, care homes and local councils, to protect rights in all their decisions and actions, meaning that people’s rights are less likely to be breached in the first place. Secondly, United Kingdom courts are now the first port of call for any human rights claimant, and United Kingdom judges consider human rights more explicitly and intensively than they could before. Thirdly, the European court is much more likely today, in considering applications from this country, to follow the reasoning and conclusions of our courts and the decisions of our public authorities. It respects our judges and the way in which the Human Rights Act is applied. Ernest Davies, Ernie Bevin and Clement Attlee were right to feel proud of what they had done.
“is not so much that every person has a specific set of positive claims to be enforced, but that persons and minority groups of persons need to be recognized as belonging to the same moral and civic world as the majority, whatever differences or disagreements there may be”.
He went on to argue that
“a proper consideration of human rights has a better chance of sustaining its case if it begins from the recognition of a common dignity or worthiness of respect among members of a community than if it assumes some comprehensive catalogue of claims that might be enforceable”.
All laws and all conventions are ultimately human constructs. There are some who dislike the ECHR and have problems with the wider issue of human rights. There are people who are not happy with the way that the court has interpreted the underlying legal principles which are enshrined in the convention. But the huge benefits that it has brought to so many people, particularly people who have traditionally been marginalised and not given the ability to participate and to engage, surely outweighs the frustrations that people sometimes feel. I, for one, am thankful that we have the ECHR.
You cannot pull out of the ECHR without leaving the Council of Europe. This alliance promotes democracy, human rights and the rule of law across 46 states. Since its inception, the Council of Europe has accepted over 200 treaties, conventions and protocols, including the Istanbul convention, to end violence against women and girls and to end domestic violence; the Lanzarote convention, to protect children from sexual exploitation and sexual abuse; and the Council of Europe convention against human trafficking. I hear the muttering on the Benches opposite, but we should remember the work that is done through the Council of Europe to defend local and regional democracy and governance. It observes elections and promotes good governance through the exchange of experience among member states—which I have done. The Council of Europe also helps member states to fight corruption and terrorism, and undertakes necessary judicial reforms. It has a group of constitutional experts, the Venice Commission, which offers legal advice to member states. Are we going to pull out of that?
The Council of Europe is supporting the people of Ukraine in the face of Russia’s ongoing aggression. It has a dedicated Ukraine action plan and a development bank which is aiding Ukraine in its recovery efforts and accommodating Ukrainian refugees. Are we really going to put all this at risk? Are we really going to reduce ourselves to little Englanders? That is what it would mean, because the people of Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales do not want to leave the European Convention on Human Rights.
Particularly so to our advantage here as a revising Chamber, and as emphasised by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and others, countless examples come to mind of the Council of Europe as a natural ally within which affiliation of 46 states the United Kingdom remains a prominent member, and where I am a recent chairman of its committee on education.
As we are all well aware, the numerous groups of people suffering disadvantage in education range from girls and women, students with disability and special needs, learners living in remote areas, and refugees and asylum seekers to those experiencing discrimination against them from a number of pretexts and prejudices, and not least those living in countries where education systems are insufficiently developed.
During its G7 presidency in 2021, the United Kingdom gave a commitment to promote education in the third world and elsewhere as necessary. What actions have the Government taken since then? Which initiatives are in progress? Can the Minister affirm that such G7 plans are being clearly designed and carried out so that they contribute towards building up the strength of international communities themselves?
What plans do the Government have, along with international partners, including at the Council of Europe, to co-ordinate the delivery of a variety of international education initiatives which are at risk of financial cuts?
As well as students, such interventions clearly stand to benefit communities, cities and regions as well. One example is the current academic partnership of joint research into green energy between the Scottish University of the Highlands and Islands in the United Kingdom and the University of Zadar in Croatia. Having helped to put this together, I declare an interest as current chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Croatia. What steps are the Government now taking to actively encourage similar partnerships, possibly facilitated by Horizon and other schemes?
Following ECHR and education as a human right, enhanced prospects for world peace will also derive from much better education and competitive skills opportunities at grass roots and within all international communities. Given that G7 countries have already embraced that objective, the United Kingdom, in its own interest and that of others, must now help to ensure that this objective is properly carried out.
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