Bill killed
The government has told lobby journalists that Dominic Raab’s curiously-named Bill of Rights Bill “is unlikely to progress in its current form”.
“Downing Street declined to guarantee that a new Bill of Rights will be introduced during the current parliament,” the BBC reported.
This should come as no surprise. I reported as long ago as 15 July that the bill was “slowly fading away”.
In my Law Society Gazette column last Friday, I thought there might be a “slimmed down reform”. I maintained that “the only true believer in Raab’s bill was Raab”.
A critical piece I wrote on the bill’s publication day in June was quoted in parliament and politely dismissed by the then justice secretary. But my view seems to be shared by the new government:
What’s remarkable is that Raab was ever allowed to introduce such an incoherent piece of legislation in the first place. I have long believed that the bill would not get through parliament. “It’s a cure in search of a problem,” Raab’s predecessor Sir Robert Buckland told me in June.
Some of the comments today have linked Raab’s bill with the government’s plans to send asylum-seekers to Rwanda, under challenge this week in the High Court. The Ministry of Justice had announced on publication day that the Bill of Rights Bill would
confirm that interim measures from the European Court of Human Rights under Rule 39, such as the one issued last week which prevented the removal flight to Rwanda, are not binding on UK courts.
But this was deliberately disingenuous. Interim measures are binding on governments, not courts. A statute passed by the UK parliament cannot exempt the UK from its treaty obligations under the human rights convention. The bill promised something it could never have delivered.
Responsibility for the Rwanda plan lies with the home secretary, now Suella Braverman. While she was still a candidate for her party’s leadership, Braverman favoured pulling out of the human rights convention. That was not government policy then and, as far as I know, it is not government policy now.
But there is speculation that the Home Office may introduce new legislation. David Allen Green says:
The claps and congratulations about the Bill of Rights being dropped should therefore not last too long.
The government is just going to seek the limit the benefits and protections of the [Human Rights] Act in other, less blatant ways.
Perhaps so, but law reform remains a matter for the Ministry of Justice. The prime minister’s spokesman said today:
A new secretary of state will consider all policies in their area, that will include ongoing bills proceeding through parliament. This is no different.
The Home Office may well have an opportunity to introduce further immigration legislation in the coming months. But it is unlikely to wrest responsibility for the Human Rights Act from the Ministry of Justice. That’s not how Whitehall works.
This afternoon, parliament’s joint committee on human rights has begun taking evidence from Sir Peter Gross, the retired judge who chaired the review of the Human Rights Act commissioned by Buckland. Joanna Cherry QC MP, the committee chair, acknowledged that the government’s bill might now be deferred. But Gross said the recommendations of his review were enduring and should not be lost in the crossfire surrounding Raab’s bill.
If Buckland had remained justice secretary, he would have introduced what he regarded as modest reforms to the Human Rights Act. That approach may be followed by the new justice secretary, Brandon Lewis. But all this will take time. And it is hardly a priority.
What happens next? To quote the great cliché used by desperate television reporters at the end of a piece-to-camera — one thing is certain: time alone will tell.