My Lords, I added my name to the noble Lord’s amendment because I, too, find it difficult to know quite how the court will deal with a particular case where it feels that more than little weight should be attached to the various matters referred to in the various paragraphs that are under consideration. It is quite striking when you look back—as I invited the noble and learned Lord to do a moment ago—to the earlier part of new Section 117A, that there is no attempt to modify, appeal or amend Section 6 of the Human Rights Act itself. If you go to Section 6, of course it takes you back to Section 2, which tells the court that, in considering whether there is a breach of the duty under Section 6, it must take into account decisions of the Strasbourg court.
It is not inconceivable, although it may be unusual, there could be a real problem for a court which is following the Human Rights Act directions and is trying to take account of what one finds in new Section 117A, bearing in mind the point that the noble and learned Lord made to me not very long ago about the purpose of setting this out in the Bill. I think that I entirely understood him to say that the purpose of this was to lay down clear guidance to the court, which the court is expected to follow. I absolutely understand the reasons why the Minister says that, but that makes it all the more important, I respectfully suggest, for the Government to avoid the temptation to be too prescriptive about the conclusions that must be reached.
The problem that comes up so often when one thinks about this sort of thing is that legislation is a fairly blunt instrument. Last week, we debated the IPP legislation; the previous Administration set out tests that the judges were required to apply in sentencing prisoners to indefinite terms of imprisonment, but it turned out that in practice the judges had to sentence people to draconian sentences more often that they would have done if left to themselves, which created a very real administrative problem for the Government. That is an example of how a blunt instrument can be too blunt and can avoid dealing with a case in the way that Lord Bingham of Cornhill explained in the case of EB (Kosovo), to which I was also a party.
It really is important to avoid being too prescriptive. Use of the word “normally” gives us that little bit of leeway. If it is not there, the court is driven to finding another way round the problem and, if it finds the prescriptive language in the various subsections that we are looking at, it will have another look at the way in which the whole chapter was introduced by the phrase to which I drew attention earlier: “must have regard to”. Then it will say, “All right, it’s a rule, but it’s not something that we must follow because we have only to have regard to it”. That takes us back to the debate about the Strasbourg court that I was talking about; those who do not particularly like to be told what to do by Strasbourg would rather not have regard to it, because they do not feel that they are obliged to.
If the Minister would like, as I think he would, to have courts regard these as principles or rules to which they should always have regard in the interests of the public at large, I suggest that we should avoid the trap that has been created, otherwise the courts in these unusual cases will feel that they have to find another solution. That may, in the longer run, be more damaging to the overall package that has been put forward in the interests of trying to solve this problem. Once you undermine the basic philosophy that the Minister is putting across, which I understand, by creating this trap for the courts in these particular cases by telling them what the conclusion must be, you begin to devalue the whole package. I think the Minister would rather not do that. That is why I felt that I should support the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, and his amendment.