---

Human Rights Judgments: Joint Committee on Human Rights Report

I, too, begin by congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Lester, on securing this debate and thank him for introducing it with characteristic eloquence. I also want to use the occasion to pay a personal tribute to him. On both the Joint Committee on Human Rights and outside he has played a sterling role in making sure that human rights remain central to the national attention. This is a fine and balanced report and it is a great tribute to the Labour Government that they introduced the Act and have done quite a lot in order to embed it in our legal system. While congratulating and thanking the Labour Government for doing all that, I hope to be forgiven for expressing some disappointment with a couple of things. First, I was disappointed to hear that the Government have been slow to respond to some of the important systemic recommendations of the Joint Committee. In some cases, I am told that the delay has been as long as one year. That is unfortunate. My second area of concern is that there has been a delay of as long as five years in resolving some of the most important and significant breaches of the European convention. It is sad that the UK is rated among the top 10 states in that regard and only Turkey and Italy have a worse record. The Joint Committee rightly recommends that the Government publish their response to the annual report of the Committee of Ministers and explain why the delay is occurring and how it will be shortened. In this context, as the report rightly says, the Ministry of Justice should take a co-ordinating role. This complies with the Committee of Ministers’ recommendation that there should be an effective, domestic mechanism for implementing European court judgments. Two substantive issues interest me, partly because I was on the Joint Committee for the first two years of its existence and partly because I happen to teach subjects that are related to these two areas. The first has to do with the prisoner’s right to vote. The question whether prisoners have a right to vote is not easy, and, ever since the debate began on who should have a right to vote, there has always been a dispute about whether this is a human right or whether it is subject to good behaviour. By and large, the debate was resolved, so far as I can see, in the following way. It is a human right in that the prisoner has a right to vote, even if he is in prison, unless he is imprisoned either for showing explicit hostility to the state—in other words, if he is guilty of treason—or for having been involved in armed rebellion. Short of this, an individual’s good conduct as a citizen has no bearing on his right to vote. In going against this view and denying prisoners the right to vote, we are out of step with many European countries and countries outside Europe. As the noble Lord, Lord Lester, rightly pointed out in response to the European court’s judgment, Ireland and Cyprus passed legislation in 1986 in giving prisoners the right to vote. There is an interesting paradox here; if prisoners do not have a right to vote, it is difficult to explain why they should regain the right to vote when they are released from prison. The second issue relates to artificial insemination and serving prisoners, as raised by Dickson v the United Kingdom. I know that the Government are preparing to move in the direction of the judgment of the European court, but they insist on five considerations being met before prisoners can have a right to artificial insemination. These five considerations virtually emasculate the right to artificial insemination. Denying the prisoner the right to artificial insemination punishes not only him or her but the spouse, which cannot be justified in law or in ethics. Some of these considerations, which the Government intend to impose or invoke, do not apply to ordinary citizens and artificial insemination and therefore seem to subject prisoners to an extra set of constraints for which there is no justification. I end with one general point, which may not directly relate to what the report says and largely concerns the function that the Joint Committee on Human Rights can perform in the public life of this country. Rightly or wrongly, the Human Rights Act, and particularly the judgments that other courts have delivered, have been subjected to all kinds of criticism, leading in some cases to pressure to abolish the Human Rights Act. We know that many of these criticisms are unfortunate, wrong or muddled, but they need to be identified and refuted. Moreover, like all new traditions—we are moving from a culture of liberty to a culture of human rights in our country—the problem is simply that as human rights become embedded, courts deliver judgments, some of which are acceptable and some of which leave something to be desired. There are also larger questions about what to do when human rights conflict with other worthwhile national goals. There is something to be learnt from criticism. Although muddled criticism should be refuted, intelligent criticism has some important lessons for us. I should have thought, therefore, that the Joint Committee on Human Rights could periodically produce reports not only to identify what the Government have or have not done but to identify and deal with the criticisms that are made of the Human Rights Act, analysing the court’s judgments and determining whether there are any lessons that we can learn. If they were to do this, these reports would make a substantial contribution to the public life of this country and would help to build up an appropriate legal tradition of interpretation. Such an intervention in public life by the Joint Committee at this early stage when human rights are being embedded would be most salutary.