My Lords, I thank all noble Lords for their contributions to the debate. I shall of course speak to each of the amendments, Amendments 1, 4 and 5. When taken together, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, observed, they have the effect of restricting the power to implement international private law agreements contained in Clause 2 in the 2007 Lugano Convention. But they not only limit the power of the United Kingdom to implement private international law agreements in this way, they also restrict our ability to mirror any such arrangements as between the United Kingdom’s different legal jurisdictions, and indeed as between the United Kingdom and the Crown dependencies and overseas territories.
Of course we accept, as we have previously, that the most pressing need for the power is in relation to the Lugano convention itself. Our application to rejoin the convention as an independent contracting party was made on 8 April—