I rise to speak to amendment 2, which I tabled with my hon. Friends the Members for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips), for Wirral South (Alison McGovern), for Ilford North (Wes Streeting), for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield), for St Helens North (Conor McGinn), for Cardiff Central (Jo Stevens) and for East Lothian (Martin Whitfield). We recognise that this legislation has been brought to the House at short notice, but we want to put the Secretary of State on notice that the concerns raised in the amendments will endure in every piece of legislation until the issues are resolved, because they speak to one of the first concerns that any Member of Parliament should have: the human rights of the people whom we represent. Amendment 2 seeks to recognise that this Government cannot pick and choose their responsibilities. On the one hand, they take full responsibility for expenditure in Northern Ireland but, on the other hand, they ignore human rights abuses and the suffering that they are causing to UK citizens.
The Bill authorises departmental expenditure to allow the continued delivery of public services in Northern Ireland in the absence of an Executive and the consequent
inability of the Northern Ireland Assembly to pass legislation to provide the same rules. That Assembly has not sat for over two years, which is why this House passed emergency legislation last November. Section 4 of the Northern Ireland (Executive Formation and Exercise of Functions) Act 2018 makes it clear that the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland is responsible for the guidelines relating to human rights in Northern Ireland. However, amendment 2 relates to the fact that she has failed to take any meaningful action to uphold that obligation and, indeed, has sought to deny it.
In a written ministerial statement on 30 January 2019, the Secretary of State said that
“the current absence of devolved Government in Northern Ireland should not dislodge the principle that it is for the devolved Administration to both legislate on, and ensure compliance with, human rights obligations in relation to such devolved matters.”—[Official Report, 30 January 2019; Vol. 653, c. 40WS.]
However, article 27 of the Vienna convention states:
“A party may not invoke the provisions of its internal law as justification for its failure to perform a treaty.”
In layman’s terms, that simply means that we cannot ignore our human rights responsibilities to the people of Northern Ireland and use devolution as a cover for doing so.