Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

I am grateful to the right hon. and learned Gentleman for his intervention. I shall say a little more about the nature of the amendment shortly, and I shall try to address his point when I do so. Given the significant status that international human rights treaties have attained in our domestic legal system, I certainly believe that Parliament must be much more involved in scrutinising treaties that incur human rights obligations on our behalf. In the current Parliament, my Committee has reported on one major human rights treaty prior to ratification: the UN convention on the rights of persons with disabilities. We have also reported on treaties that, while not strictly speaking human rights treaties, have human rights implications, including the Council of Europe convention on the prevention of terrorism and, in a manner of speaking, the UK-Libya prisoner transfer agreement, to which I shall refer shortly. When we looked at the UN convention on the rights of persons with disabilities—a major UN treaty—we conducted a detailed inquiry into the reservations and interpretive declarations put forward by the Government. We had a number of submissions from interested individuals and organisations, and oral evidence from the relevant Minister, whom we were able to question, both through correspondence and directly, on the background to those reservations. Indeed, they were somewhat modified, I think, as a result of our efforts. The report was subsequently debated in the other place. By contrast, we were not able to report properly on the Libya treaty, as time was not made available to enable us to do so. That treaty of all treaties should have been properly examined. At the time, it had implications for the case of al-Megrahi, the Libyan who had been imprisoned in Scotland in connection with the Lockerbie bombing. In fact, his removal to Libya did not ultimately take place under the transfer treaty, but when the treaty was under consideration, that was very much an active consideration. However, we were not able to scrutinise the matter properly because we were not given the time to do so. When we come to the relevant clause later today, I hope to say a little more about the problems that we experienced. Overall, however, the principle behind the Government's proposals is welcome, in light of our experience. On explanatory memorandums, under the new statutory regime a copy of the treaty has to be laid before Parliament. Although it is the Government's practice to lay an explanatory memorandum before Parliament, that is not provided for in the Bill. I believe that the key to effective parliamentary scrutiny is the timely provision of fully reasoned explanations and justifications by the Government—a point that the right hon. and learned Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Mr. Hogg) just made. The explanatory memorandums that we have seen, generally speaking, do provide that. That, I suspect, is why we did not specify that they should do so in the amendment. However, we are surprised that the Bill does not reflect current practice under the Ponsonby rule by requiring an explanatory memorandum to be laid before Parliament at the same time as the treaty, in order to facilitate scrutiny within the 21-day period. We asked the Government whether they would turn the practice into a requirement, but they say that they do not consider it necessary to do so. However, I would suggest that it is in the Government's interests to explain their reasons to Parliament at the earliest possible opportunity. The Government say that they intend to continue their practice of laying such memorandums before Parliament, and of course we welcome that assurance, but it is not the same as having an express requirement in the Bill, which is what my amendment would achieve. We also asked the Government whether they would undertake to notify the relevant Select Committees when a treaty had been agreed. That was in response to an undertaking that they gave to the Procedure Committee that copies of all treaties laid before Parliament would be sent to the relevant Select Committees at the same time. This is important, because we do not have the resources systematically to monitor the laying of treaties before Parliament, and we have only 21 days in which to do our job of scrutinising them. Any time lost might therefore prevent a treaty from being scrutinised at all. That was one of the problems that we had with the prisoner transfer treaty with Libya. Even with an undertaking to notify the Select Committees, however, there have been delays between the laying of a treaty and their being drawn to our attention. The Libyan treaty is an example. We learned that that treaty had been laid only some way into the 21-day period. I hope that the Government will consider laying these explanatory memorandums and reinforcing their undertaking to notify Select Committees when a treaty has been laid, to enable us to do our job effectively and properly, and inform Parliament as a consequence.