My Lords, I am glad to have this opportunity to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, who referred to the International Agreements Committee, on which I have the privilege to serve. We considered the question of the ratification of the Istanbul convention. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, the chairman of that committee, will have an opportunity to contribute to the debate in a few moments, so I will not pre-empt what he has to say by way of an authoritative description of the committee’s views.
I want to add just three points. First, the Istanbul convention was signed by the coalition Government in 2012, a Government of which I was then a member. We would not have anticipated then that it would have taken so long for it to be ratified or that there would have been any difficulty in respect of non-discrimination in achieving that. I am glad the Government are bringing forward Clauses 66 to 68 to enable the extraterritorial jurisdiction measures to be dealt with. Surely now is the time and this is the Bill to take ourselves to the point where we can ratify.
Secondly, a number of us in your Lordships’ House served in the other place and realise what it takes to get as many as 135 Members of Parliament to turn up on a Friday morning to support a Private Member’s Bill, but that is what happened on 24 February 2017 to support what is now the Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence
(Ratification of Convention) Act 2017. There is a tendency in government to say, “Well, that was just a Private Member’s Bill.” No, it is an Act of Parliament that requires Ministers to set out in a Statement to the House when they have a timetable for ratification and, in the absence of such a timetable, to report annually on the situation. Back in 2017, the 135 Members who turned up on a Friday morning to support that Bill and turn it into an Act would not have expected that there would have been four annual reports, with no resolution yet in sight and no timetable published by the Government. The evidence from this House and, indeed, the other House, is that Parliament expects that to happen.
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Thirdly, we looked at the whole question of a pilot scheme. I looked at the response of the review from July last year. It seems that even if a pilot scheme is required, what it is required to do is understand what the administrative processes concerned are—not suggest that we should be in contravention of our international obligations under the convention. We should accept Amendment 87 in the name of my noble friend Lady Helic, who was a distinguished adviser to that coalition Government, and say that whatever the outcome of the pilot scheme, whatever the administrative arrangements, we should not arrive at a position where we discriminate between people according to their status, including immigration status, in respect of the support they receive as victims of domestic violence and abuse. That cannot be the right outcome. Ministers, to be fair to them, have not suggested that they want to discriminate between people by their status. That being the case, we should use this opportunity to bring ourselves into compliance with our international obligations, then let Ministers work out subsequently what the administrative processes are for achieving that.