Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who is absolutely right. The purpose of the wording is indeed to muddy the waters and to make things more difficult to adjudicate. However, I question the appropriateness of the provision being included at all, in that if the whole point is to restore to this House the right to decide whether a treaty is appropriate, it seems quite perverse then to say, "But if the Minister doesn't like that decision, he can simply carry on presenting the treaty to the House, through a long process of attrition, until eventually there aren't enough people here or people of the right persuasion are here and the treaty can get through." That is not what should be in clause 24. The other expression that I would like the Minister to explain is the one that was touched on in our first debate in Committee this afternoon. Clause 24(1)(b) refers to the treaty having been published""in a way that a Minister of the Crown thinks appropriate"." I just do not know what that means or why it has been included. I assume that a treaty will be published in the form in which it was signed, not in a way that a Minister thinks it appropriate for people to read. The only, very small explanation that I can conceive of is that if the treaty was signed in another language, it might be appropriate for the Minister concerned to publish it in English, for the benefit of this House and the wider British public. However, beyond that simple matter of translation, I do not understand what the Minister has in mind by insisting that a treaty can be published in a way that a Minister thinks appropriate, rather than in the form in which it was signed, in whatever proceedings led to its being agreed. I would like the Minister to explain what is intended by that phrase, because clearly somebody has something in mind that is not obvious from a simple reading of it.