Paul Evans and Murray Hunt.

Q1 Chair: Good afternoon, everyone. This is a session of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, a Joint Committee of the Lords and Commons. Our session today follows on from the committee’s previous work on the Government’s proposals to replace the Human Rights Act with a Bill of Rights. The Government’s proposed Bill of Rights was introduced to the House on 22 June and, if enacted, it would introduce quite wide-ranging changes to the human rights framework in the United Kingdom by repealing and replacing the Human Rights Act and would have quite significant implications for Parliament’s role.

Our evidence session today will consider the impact the proposed Bill of Rights would have on the role of Parliament in upholding the protection of human rights in the United Kingdom. We have two witness panels today and we are usually very well favoured with witnesses but, if I may say so, I think we have particularly stellar panels today.

Our first panel consists of Paul Evans CBE who worked as a clerk in the House of Commons from 1981 to 2019, returning as clerk of committees responsible for the staff of the House Select Committees. He was the first person to clerk this Joint Committee on Human Rights and he is currently an honorary researcher at the Constitution Unit, UCL. You are very welcome, Mr Evans.

We are also joined by Murray Hunt, who is the director of the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law. From 2004 to 2017 Murray was legal adviser to this committee and he is the United Kingdom’s alternate member of the Council of Europe’s European Commission for Democracy through Law, which is known as the Venice Commission.

Later this afternoon we will be joined by two of England’s most outstanding QCs and Members of the House of Lords, Lord Pannick and Helena Kennedy, but for present purposes we are proceeding with Mr Hunt and Mr Evans.

I will ask the first question, which is a bit of a scene-setter for today and I will start with Mr Hunt. Do you think that the Human Rights Act has been problematic for parliamentary sovereignty?

Murray Hunt: Good afternoon. It is a great pleasure to be back before the committee, and with the clerk who was the clerk when I became the legal adviser. I think for both of us it is very strange to be sitting on this side of the table, even after such a long time.

The short answer to that is no. The reality is that the Human Rights Act has significantly enhanced Parliament’s involvement in human rights in a variety of ways. It is one of the great urban myths of human rights that the Human Rights Act has marginalised and diminished Parliament’s role. It simply goes against the evidence, if one looks back over the two decades that the Act has been in operation.

It has enhanced Parliament’s role partly because of aspects of the framework, the design of the Human Rights Act, the way in which it was designed to acknowledge the importance of parliamentary democracy in our constitutional traditions. So the Section 3/Section 4 balance, the novel device of the declaration of incompatibility, the interpretative obligation, the Section 19 obligation to certify compatibility of a Bill on a Minister—these were all elements of the design of the Act that recognised that in this country we have an extremely strong constitutional tradition, of which Parliament is at the centre.

Those features of the framework set up the whole framework to put Parliament at the centre. What has happened since then, building on that framework, is that the institutional machinery that was set up following the Act, including particularly this committee, has developed a series of practices, processes and systems that have given life to the aspiration to put Parliament at the centre of our human rights system. We have a very developed system of legislative scrutiny for human rights compatibility, which this committee carries forward. We have a very advanced process for parliamentary involvement in looking at the Government’s response to court judgments on human rights.

These put Parliament at the centre of our human rights framework and that is why internationally the UK genuinely does have a claim that the system under the Human Rights Act creates a framework for human rights that is unique in the world, which is genuinely in a substantive sense world leading. That is because of the balance it creates between the different branches. It gives each of the branches a role in human rights protection. It very carefully devises those roles and that has been fleshed out by the practices since, in a way that means that those branches all have a shared responsibility, and they recognise and respect the limits of their role and the roles of the other branches. That is a crucial feature of the Act—it is built on shared responsibility, gives a role to all the branches, including the democratic branches—and in giving effect to that over the years this committee in particular has made sure that Parliament is at the centre.

It is therefore the case that Parliament these days debates human rights matters in a substantive sense, not in an abstract sense, far more often than it ever did before the Human Rights Act.

Q2 Chair: Thank you. That is very helpful. If I might follow on from that question, you have emphasised the centrality of Parliament’s role under the Human Rights Act. Mr Evans, what do you think would be the ideal process for Parliament, and in particular this committee, to be provided with sufficient, timely information as to the human rights compatibility of Bills introduced to Parliament? I know that we have a current process but there might be alternatives to that. Can you comment on that?

Paul Evans: I can certainly comment on that, but I would like to begin by supporting everything that Murray has said about parliamentary sovereignty. It is not a phrase I am very comfortable with, because it means too many different things to too many different people, but if it means that Parliament is the sole maker of statute and Parliament passed the Human Rights Act and the courts have done what they have been told to do in the Human Rights Act, that seems to me to be quite compatible with parliamentary sovereignty. Taking up Murray’s point about sharing, sometimes people use the phrase as though it meant that Parliament was the sole arbiter of the law. That cannot be so and never has been. It is a shared decision. I think that the process through which this committee is involved in examining legislation as it passes through the House is a crucial part of that dialogue between the different institutions that are involved in interpreting the law, as well as making the law.

I think the committee has done well. The way it began in 2001 when it was feeling its way and deciding to put legislative scrutiny front and centre of its programme was a very creative decision and a very interesting one, and it developed a kind of legislative scrutiny that was unique in its depth. Although it was looking at it through the particular lens of human rights, it was none the less novel to look at legislation in the Select Committee context in this way. It enabled that dialogue between the committee and the government departments to take off and develop and it became a two-way dialogue and the observation is that over time the committee’s influence on the policymakers and the legislative drafters was strong. Its influence on the courts is perhaps not necessarily so strong, but I think the courts nevertheless know that it exists and pay attention to it from time to time. It is part of that dialogue.

You asked how you could be provided with sufficient and timely information. The problem is always that legislation is made in a rush, and I do not know that we will ever escape from that. It would require a complete cultural shift, and people have tried to make that cultural shift but have always been defeated. The obvious thing is pre-legislative scrutiny. That would be the ideal. This committee has a particular range. That pre-legislative scrutiny could be confined, for example, to the human rights issues. You could try to get Ministers to produce memoranda, draft clauses and so forth in advance of the Bill itself, so you could have a restricted pre-legislative scrutiny relating to human rights.

I think that is all quite idealistic, to be honest, in terms of changing the Government’s attitude, but the key thing is that human rights memorandum and getting it good. I think the committee has been successful at this, but it could probably do more, which is to push the process of thinking about human rights upstream. It has to happen before the Bill arrives in Parliament, which is the point at which you say time is very short and it is quite difficult to do thorough scrutiny. The more of this work that can be pushed upstream into the policy-making process the better.

Q3 Baroness Ludford: I want to ask about Section 19 of the Human Rights Act. The Bill of Rights Bill removes the requirement under Section 19 for the Minister responsible for a Bill to make a written statement as to whether in their view the legislation they are introducing is compatible with ECHR rights. What do you think the impact of that change will be on the legislative process? I invite either of you to pick that up.

Paul Evans: Section 19 was a cunning idea, and there are two great benefits of it, in my view, the first being that it is a personal statement by a Minister saying that in their belief this proposed legislation is compatible with human rights. The nature of that personal statement forces the Minister to ask questions of civil servants, policy developers, legal drafters, and satisfy themselves personally. It is quite important that they must sign the statement and put their name to it and that drives a process behind the scenes, which I think must be very positive.

The other thing that Murray might want to talk about, as he has more experience, is it gives Parliament, and particularly this committee, a peg to hang legislative scrutiny on and it has developed the human rights memorandum system.

Baroness Ludford: I am sorry, I should have said, I am Sarah Ludford, I am a Liberal Democrat Member of the House of Lords.

Murray Hunt: The process that drives that is particularly important and is the preparation for the ministerial signature on the certificate of compatibility. As Paul says, the Minister knows it is going on the front of every Bill and the internal governmental machinery that is necessary to satisfy the Minister to sign the statement means that there must be conscientious consideration of a Bill’s compatibility. From the beginning, and particularly once the JCHR on the basis of Section 19 started scrutinising justifications for the statements, the pressure was on the departments’ legal teams to make sure that advice was robust. That has eventually produced the human rights memoranda, or the ECHR memoranda, which this committee receives, which can still be of variable quality, including the one on the current Bill of Rights Bill, but have at various times been of quite exceptional quality.

I want to briefly explain the importance of Section 19 and the history of how we arrived at the human rights memoranda. In the early days of the Act’s operation and this committee’s operation, the Explanatory Notes in accompanying Bills had a section on ECHR compatibility and that section in the Explanatory Notes was very variable from department to department. The committee tried, over quite a long time, to persuade departments that rather than put variable-quality explanations in the Explanatory Notes, they should take the product of that process that leads up to the Minister signing the Section 19 statement and turn their legal advice into a memorandum, not including legally privileged information. The committee has never asked the Government to disclose legally privileged information, recognising that a lawyer may need to look through it and say, “Okay, we cannot disclose that part”, but nevertheless that would be a starting point that would show the working and that would massively facilitate this committee’s scrutiny of the Bill and the analysis that has gone on in the departments.

The Government dug their heels in against that suggestion for quite a few years, until a very enlightened and experienced Bill team manager called Charles Goldie, who had run many Bill teams, was persuaded that it was in the department’s own interests, having done the work, to use that work to provide the committee to demonstrate how much work had been done. That would reduce the number of questions that it might be asked, it would focus the committee’s scrutiny and, crucially, it would enable the Government to demonstrate the work that had been done pre introduction. When the Bill might be challenged further down the line, before courts in this country or in Strasbourg, that would make it easier for the Government to invoke the margin of appreciation because they could say, “Look at what we did conscientiously to assess compatibility internally before it then went to Parliament for proper scrutiny”. That enlightened Bill team manager published a human rights memorandum, and that was the beginning of ECHR memoranda being provided by departments.

It is an absolutely crucial piece of information for the Government to demonstrate what they are doing, for Parliament to check that the Government are doing a good job of internally assessing compatibility, and then subsequently when these laws get litigated—as they sometimes do—for the court to be able to see to what extent there has been conscientious consideration of ECHR compatibility issues.

If Section 19 were lost, all that is at risk. Of course, an undertaking could be extracted, perhaps by this committee, from the Government that even if Section 19 were to be lost the memoranda would still be provided, and perhaps a commitment that they could be improved. There are many ways in which they could be improved, by being more timely, more detailed and broader in scope.

The importance, as Paul says, of Section 19 is that it means that that machinery of government is there, because the Minister is responsible and it means that the lawyers will have to advise.

Lord Henley: I just want to make sure that I have this right. As I remember it, both the Minister in the Lords and the Minister in the Commons signed the appropriate Section 19, having done the legislation with the official you mentioned, Charles Goldie, when I think he was on about his 10th Bill; I think he is on about his 20th Bill now and is, as you say, very much an old hand. I remember the advice I was offered. Do you think it would be in the interests of government as a whole, of whatever party, that this committee offered some guidance on what the process ought to be and what it ought to look like at the end, rather than just the Minister having been briefed, then a quick signature and that is about it?

Paul Evans: Very much so. There is the Cabinet Office guide to legislative procedure, which fleshes it out a little bit, and that has distilled some of this committee’s recommendations into the guidance. It would definitely be useful for departments to have the benefit of this committee’s guidance as to what the expectations are, what should be going into a human rights memorandum, how to draw it up and so on.

Q4 Florence Eshalomi: One thing we have been looking at is the legislative scrutiny work. Can you set out why the committee began to do this and what impact do you think it will have on the legislative scrutiny over this period?

Paul Evans: Perhaps I should pick that up, as I was there when it happened. Back in 2001 the Human Rights Act was a startling new idea. It was embedded in the legislative process and the committee felt that its first job was to make sure that the culture of human rights was embedded in the policy-making and legislative drafting process. It decided that the best way that it could do that—and I am quite sure it made the right decision—was to examine legislation, put legislation front and centre of its work and examine it in this kind of detail, through the prism of human rights.

To put a little detail behind what Murray has just told you, we began by writing these incredibly long letters with 72 questions to the department about the human rights compatibility of each Bill that came up, and the committee decided to do it across the board. We had to retreat quite quickly from that decision for private Bills and Private Members’ Bills, but we decided initially to do it across the board because it needed to embed the culture across the whole range of government activity.

Those long letters with dozens of questions distilled down more into the memoranda. Even over the first four or five years of the committee’s existence it became quite clear that the quality of drafting and the consciousness of human rights upstream in the policy-making and legislative drafting process had improved. The committee had to ask fewer questions, it had fewer problems with legislation, so it was an educational process and the decision was about embedding human rights into the policy-making process.

Murray Hunt: Can I speak to the impact part of your question on what is the impact of the legislative scrutiny work? The impact of good legislative scrutiny is notoriously difficult to measure. I tried to do this in 2010 after the committee had been going for about 10 years, with the help of an academic research grant, and we looked at the quality of parliamentary debates. Political scientists take the view that the main way of measuring the impact of good legislative scrutiny is how often a Bill has been amended and what sorts of amendments you can point to that have changed the text of the Bill. I remember Paul at the time pulling my leg and saying that the only effect of this committee’s legislative scrutiny was that those members of the committee who had been most successful in taking forward amendments recommended by the committee in the Chambers lost their seats at the subsequent election.

Chair: A lesson for us all.

Murray Hunt: There were two members in particular that Paul had in mind, who were very effective at taking forward amendments from the committee. Undeterred, we tried to look at whether there was any measurable way of qualitatively looking at whether the quality of parliamentary debate on human rights issues had improved. It is extremely difficult, time-consuming, and labour-intensive to do, but we think it is possible and the finding in 2010 was that there had been a qualitative increase in the quality of human rights discussion and debate in Parliament. That was demonstrable mainly by narrative case studies of examples where the committee had intervened and so on.

There is some work to be done. On the work since then, has the committee’s greater focus on recommending amendments to legislation to give effect to its recommendations and reports had more effect on the political scientists’ view of the changes to the legislation that had been taken forward? That would be an interesting project to do. I think that there is more work that could be done on assessing impact, but I would stick by the 2010 finding that there clearly has been a qualitative increase in the quality of debate.

Florence Eshalomi: Apologies, I should have said I am Florence Eshalomi and I am Labour MP for Vauxhall since 2019. I will be taking your notes on amendments very seriously.

Q5 Lord Dubs: I am Alf Dubs and I am a Labour Member of the House of Lords. Part of my question was answered when Paul talked about the merits of pre-legislative scrutiny. In addition to that, are there any other things that Parliament or this committee could do differently to improve our ability to consider the human rights compatibility of legislation before Parliament?

Paul Evans: Going back to my point, which is pushing the process back upstream as much as possible, if the Bill becomes an Act perhaps the other thing this committee could contribute is a measured assessment of the objections that this Bill embodies to the impact of human rights on the process, to weigh those objections and to discuss them in its reports a bit more. I do not know how much you do that already, but the Bill is suggesting that there is a conflict. I think that this committee can talk through that conflict and shed light on whether that conflict is real or imagined when it is discussing its legislative scrutiny.

Lord Dubs: Murray, will the practice of the committee need to change following the Bill of Rights? I should say, welcome back, Murray.

Murray Hunt: Thank you, Lord Dubs. It is very good to see you. That will partly depend on whether Section 19 survives. If the Bill is enacted and Section 19 is still not in it, if it is repealed by the Act, I think your practices may need to change. If you extract the undertaking in lieu of Section 19 that we discussed earlier, your practices could continue, but that will be necessary to ensure that the quality of the information that you are receiving and the work that has been done within departments is still going on.

One of the biggest impacts if the Bill goes through in its current form is that there will be a significant increase in declarations of incompatibility—there is no doubt about that—as a result of the provisions in the Bill. That will have massive implications for this committee in how it allocates its scarce resources between the different elements of its work. That is one of the most serious potential implications of the Bill for this committee’s work in its current form.

Chair: On that note, I will bring in Baroness Massey, who is also joining us remotely, to ask some questions about the declarations of incompatibilities and the remedial order process.

Q6 Baroness Massey of Darwen: I want to ask about incompatibilities and the remedial order process. I have two questions and I will ask them separately and you both know a lot about this, so maybe you should just choose between you which one you wish to answer.

First, is there sufficient parliamentary involvement in holding the Government to account for addressing human rights incompatibilities that have been identified by the courts, whether in the UK or Strasbourg? What should be done differently, if anything?

Murray Hunt: Another of the often-repeated parts of the Human Rights Act is that the remedial order process marginalises Parliament; whereas in fact remedial orders receive an extensive amount of parliamentary scrutiny, particularly by this committee, and in some senses remedial orders receive better scrutiny than primary legislation. There is already very extensive parliamentary scrutiny by this committee of remedial orders. There is also scrutiny by this committee of a Government’s response to any court judgment on human rights, whether it is under the Human Rights Act or from Strasbourg, but I think that there is scope for more involvement of Parliament more widely following this committee’s expert detailed scrutiny of the Government’s response.

My short answer to “Could things be done better?” is that the process that follows a court judgment, which requires Parliament to consider and requires the Government to respond, could be improved in a number of specific and quite detailed ways. It is quite interesting to go back to a report of the committee in 2010 at the end of that Parliament, called Enhancing Parliament’s Role in Relation to Human Rights Judgments, in scrutiny of human rights judgments responses. That set out a lot of detailed ways in which the whole process could be improved to impose a timetable, to have more transparency, to ensure that the Government were coming forward with detailed explanations of what they were proposing to do.

In fact, at the back of that report, Lord Henley, there is some guidance for departments on responses to human rights judgments. That gives some quite detailed expectations of what the committee had built up through its reports in the previous decade about what it wanted the Government to do following a court judgment that would facilitate the committee’s scrutiny. There are some recommendations in there that the Government did not respond to. They were interrupted by an election and there has never been a response to that committee report, but I think that there are some quite useful resources in there.

If I can throw out one additional thought, of course no parliamentary committee has the power of initiative. I can feel Paul’s clerkly bristles rising as I make this suggestion, but a power of initiative in this committee, following a period in which the Government have failed to bring forward a response to a judgment, could be quite an interesting way of focusing the Government’s mind. One of the problems with implementing judgments is that the initiative rests with the Government, and however much prodding they receive from this committee there is no mechanism or tool that can force the Government’s hand. If the committee had the power of initiative following a period that was a reasonable period for the Government to bring forward a solution, that might be a way of focusing the Government’s mind.

Paul Evans: To disappoint Murray, I think two years’ retirement has meant that I have lost all grip on moral principles, because I rather support his latter suggestion. The biggest gap is if the Government just sit on their hands after a declaration of incompatibility, whether from here or Strasbourg. Maybe something in the Standing Orders—and it would take some ingenuity—to plug that gap would be good.

On the other thing, we did a report in 2002 on making remedial orders and the point made there was that it was a very long, drawn-out process, especially if you are going to have more of them—the 60- or 120-day delays. The suggestion by the committee then was that if this committee gave the green light to a remedial action it could go ahead rather than waiting 60 days or 120 days. That is quite controversial also, but should we trust this committee to have done all the work? I think you probably can, and that would speed up the process of getting things through if the committee could greenlight them.

Q7 Baroness Massey of Darwen: Thank you for those very interesting answers. I should have said at the beginning that I am Doreen Massey, I am a Labour Peer.

My next question, which you may be able to answer quite briefly, is: are the current and proposed remedial processes for addressing incompatibilities adequate, especially in the light of the likely increase in declarations of incompatibility that would be a consequence of the Bill of Rights? Could the process be improved?

Paul Evans: The recommendations in that 2002 committee report about speeding up the process are important. If there are more of them, that will be an issue. I think the process is quite good as it stands. I do not think it requires major surgery.

There was one other suggestion in that report, which was that if this committee reported against a remedial proposal the House would have to have a debate in which it agreed to disagree with the committee before it proceeded to agree with the legislation proposed. That was a second shield, which I thought was also quite an interesting idea. Basically the process is pretty good.

Murray Hunt: I agree with Paul. There may be some scope for streamlining of the process and that will probably be necessary if the number of declarations of incompatibility, in particular from our courts, is going to increase and the number of judgments from Strasbourg is going to increase. There may well be scope to do that; otherwise, I agree with Paul and perhaps the attention should be more on when this committee has done its work, how are other parliamentarians involved in that discussion so that it is not just left to this committee.

Q8 Lord Henley: Lord Henley, a Conservative Member of the House of Lords. In the consultation on introducing the Modern Bill of Rights, they referred to introducing a democratic shield where Parliament would be asked to debate adverse judgments. Do you think that would be a good idea?

Paul Evans: You cannot stop Parliament doing it if it wants to. It would be nice if it was a well-informed debate. There will be advantages in a Standing Order that required this committee to have reported before any such debate took place.

Murray Hunt: I entirely agree with Paul. The more parliamentary involvement there can be following a judgment that requires parliamentary consideration, the better. That is a simple, straightforward matter of democratic legitimation and that is one of the things that the convention and the Human Rights Act create space for. Often there is a big debate to be had following a court judgment, so it is important that Parliament gets involved.

We know from what happened on prisoner voting the risk that is posed if there is a Motion before the Commons after an unpopular judgment, a judgment that is unpopular with the Government. The risk of that turning into a “who decides” debate, rather than a debate about how that judgment should be responded to and implemented, following the work of this committee, as Paul says, informed by the work of this committee, is great. The way in which the proposal is put in the consultation paper—a duty on the Secretary of State to notify Parliament of adverse judgments when they are received—is very good. That will be the first time the Government have responded to the 2010 report, which requires more information to be given to Parliament. But the possibility of a Motion to debate judgments shortly after they are received is an extremely bad idea, in my view, because it will lead to a debate about who decides, rather than a debate informed by the deliberations of this committee.

Chair: It was very clear that those sorts of debates would ideally be informed by a report from this committee about the substance of the decision, as opposed to who decides whether or not it is followed. On a connected point, I will bring in Florence.

Q9 Florence Eshalomi: Looking at Parliament’s role in holding the Government to account, especially around international and domestic human rights, in your view how could the UK Parliament’s understanding of the European Convention on Human Rights and the UK’s international human rights obligations be improved? How could this happen?

Paul Evans: You cannot expect every MP and Peer to be an expert in everything. Let us begin with that. That is why we set up committees. The best way Parliament can be better informed is through the JCHR. I engaged in a little Twitter spat recently with someone who criticised an MP, and I cannot remember who the MP was, who asked on Twitter—rather unwisely, perhaps—whether the Human Rights Act protected abortion rights. Some QC responded, “It is disgraceful that this MP does not know anything about human rights” and I responded and said, “No, it is not. Why should they? They have asked a question. That is the important thing.” That is a key thing for me: that this committee is the thing that informs it. Of course, you could have better information, but MPs and Peers cannot be experts in everything so a bit of delegation is fair enough, in my view.

Links with the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe—which, incidentally, I also spent a lot of time working for at the same time as I was working for the committee—would be good and if they could be formalised, I think that would be great. When I was clerking the Defence Committee, it was much more involved in the NATO Parliamentary Assembly than this committee, as far as I know, has ever been in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. Some link between the delegations and this committee might be quite helpful.

Murray Hunt: I entirely agree with that, and one way of doing it would be if there was some overlap of membership between this committee and the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. That would open up quite a lot of opportunities there for interaction, dialogue and synergies between this committee and that committee. If there were a member who was an active member of both committees, a member of the delegation, that would be a practical way of achieving that.

I will make a couple of other very quick suggestions about how to try to increase understanding more broadly across Parliament about the convention. One worth exploring is to have a regular evidence session before this committee with the UK judge at the European Court of Human Rights. We are now used to judges giving evidence to the Lords Constitution Committee. The parameters for judges giving such evidence are now well established and the areas of questioning that are not appropriate, given the need to respect the independence of the judiciary. That is very well established and I think we should build on that experience to invite the UK judge to attend this committee for an information session, ideally on the record.

Nick Bratza came to this committee at the height of the prisoner voting standoff, in fact. He had to bat away some questions from a particular member, who is now the sponsor of the Bill of Rights Bill, who wanted to go into the merits of the prisoner voting case, but the risk of that can be minimised. It was a hugely useful session to give some life to these judges from the Strasbourg court before parliamentarians, and we explored a lot of practical issues that the court faces. It is part of building links with the Council of Europe institutions.

One other quick suggestion is that mainstreaming is the big challenge for all parliaments that have human rights committees. Every parliament needs a human rights committee, in my view, but the danger of having a specialised human rights committee, especially a very good one, is that the rest of your parliament leaves it to you to do everything on human rights. It is necessary to try to find ways of mainstreaming human rights, while preserving the role of the specialist committee. There are all sorts of cultural obstacles to doing that in this Parliament, but there is a lot of practical ways of doing it that could still be explored and I think some of them are beginning to happen.

I was interested to see the joint letter about pre-legislative scrutiny with other committees. I think that more joint committee working on human rights-relevant issues would be one way of doing that. Another way, which I think is also beginning to happen, is more proactive deployment of the human rights expertise that Parliament has at its disposal, including the human rights experts who advise this committee advising other committees but not waiting to be asked, because other committees do not always realise when they need that help. More proactive deployment by officers to speak as counsel of the expertise that is available to Parliament to other committees where it is needed would be a useful way of doing some mainstreaming, and also this committee being an engine of mainstreaming by encouraging other committees in a co-operative and collaborative way to take up human rights issues that are within the work that they are doing.

Chair: One thing we have had recently is other Select Committees asking members of this committee to guest when they are on an inquiry that has human rights implications. Do you think that is a good thing and something that we should encourage more of?

Murray Hunt: That sounds a very good thing.

Paul Evans: It is very good. I think Lucinda was responsible for getting the guesting provision on to the Standing Orders, so all credit to her.

Chair: I am very conscious of the time, and it is partly my fault for chipping in there, because we must wind up this panel in five minutes. I am going to bring in Alf to ask our next question.

Q10 Lord Dubs: Should Parliament and this committee to do more to hold the Government to account for compliance with international and domestic human rights standards? If so, what should we do differently?

Murray Hunt: I think that this committee already does what it can, given the finite capacity it has with 12 members and a secretariat. Its resources are finite and it already does what it can. The answer to that is probably my previous comments about mainstreaming, trying to get other committees and parliamentarians to take responsibility for pursuing human rights accountability questions.

There are parts of the international human rights monitoring machinery that pass Parliament by altogether. I am not up to speed on the current universal periodic review process. The UK is having its human rights record examined in the Human Rights Council in its universal periodic review this autumn. During my time at the JCHR that was a process that entirely passed Parliament by, but it is an interesting opportunity when the world’s spotlight is on the UK’s human rights record. I think there are opportunities to align more closely with those external scrutiny monitoring processes and mechanisms in the appropriate way, but it cannot all be done by this committee.

Chair: You both touched on our Standing Orders in your answers. I am going to bring Florence in on what will probably be our final question, on Standing Orders.

Q11 Florence Eshalomi: Looking at your long service—1981 when I was just born—what more do you think that this committee could do? Could you recommend any changes to our ways of working and our Standing Orders?

Paul Evans: If I can perhaps squeeze in, everything that needs to be done with Standing Orders and ways of working has been discussed already. I will not add anything to that, but I emphasise the upstream thing.

Murray Hunt: On ways of working, I think that there is a case to be made for measuring the performance of this Parliament as a whole on human rights matters against some international standards on parliaments and human rights, which are now more developed than they were. There is a set of UN principles on parliaments and human rights and the role of parliaments in human rights, trying to give some guidance to parliaments. The Scottish Parliament’s Human Rights Committee conducted an audit of the Scottish Parliament’s performance on human rights in a process that I gave some help to as an independent expert. It is a very useful exercise to do, to apply some principles, look across Parliament and identify where the gaps are, make some recommendations about how they could be improved—some practical, implementable recommendations about how the human rights performance of the whole Parliament could be improved. There may be some scope in exploring that.

Chair: Thank you both very much. It has been an immensely useful session for us and plenty of suggestions about ways of improving our own way of working have come out of it. Paul, can I bring you back in for a last point?

Paul Evans: I wanted to get off my chest that we did a big inquiry into the meaning of public authority for care homes back in the first Parliament. Section 72 of the Care Act 2014 brought it into statute. As far as I can see in the Bill of Rights Bill, Section 72 will fall by the wayside if the Bill is passed and Clause 34 will not be covered by Section 72 of the Care Act 2014. I wanted to put that on the record.

Chair: That is very helpful. Perhaps if I could leave you both with this thought. If we had had more time today, we would have asked you both whether there are any changes introduced by the Bill of Rights that you think are important and that you welcome, and conversely whether you think there are aspects of the Bill of Rights that are of concern and should not be included in the Bill of Rights for the United Kingdom. I know that Murray is already doing some work at the Bingham Centre, but are you prepared to have a think about those two questions and write to us about them?

Murray Hunt: I am certainly happy to do so. Clause 37 strikes me as very worrying, and Clause 1(3) strikes me as really odd.

Chair: We will look forward to having your further thoughts on that. I am sorry we do not have time for it this afternoon, but we will look forward to reading about it. Once again, thank you both very much.

will now formally close this meeting.