Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Lord Desai Excerpts

Thursday 24th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Baroness, who has done so much for the cause of religious freedom. I have also been impressed by the many noble Lords who have reported on human rights violations of Article 18 around the world.

I will concentrate not on what ought to be, but on what is, and why. The UDHR was more or less a dead letter in the years of the Cold War. We each tried to protect out patch and let the communists do what they liked by way of persecution. Their persecution was secular, not religious—they persecuted the religious and atheists alike. It is only since the breakdown of the Cold War in 1991 that the discourse on human rights has become important in the international sphere. I remember that because I did some work on it for the United Nations Development Programme some years ago. What has happened since the beginning of the 21st century is that the golden period of about 10 years when we could talk about human rights and enforce human rights has now gone, for two major reasons. First, the rise of Islamism, as a threat to Muslim states in the Middle East and Asia, has weakened the state in those countries. Islamism has also posed a terrorist threat to western countries, whereby the whole question of religious identity has become somewhat debatable.

In the past three or four years, we have witnessed the breakdown of the international order. We were used to an international order, with the United States, the UK, France, and so on going out to protect certain kinds of freedom around the world. What we have witnessed in Syria and since is that nobody is going to police this world. If nation states are weak with respect to attacks on minorities—if not complicit sometimes in attacks on minorities, as in ISIS, and Brunei and in various other places—and if the international system is not capable of rushing to the aid of people whose human rights are being violated, it is clear that that sort of international system is now dead. Not all that many years ago, people were against a unipolar system and were dying for a multipolar system of international relations. Well, it is here—and it is dreadful, because a multipolar system is an anarchic system, and in an anarchic system whoever has the power of armaments and money will get away with violating people’s human rights. It is not just about Article 18; the sheer safety of civilians is being violated across the Middle East. As many noble Lords have said, Muslims are killing Muslims in larger numbers than ever in the past. It is not just Sunnis killing Shias and Shias killing Sunnis; Sunnis are killing Sunnis as well, in ISIS.

The international system is helpless, because we have decided that liberal interventionism is no longer possible. That is our decision. Whether it is right or not, we have decided that it is not possible. If you cannot be a liberal interventionist, you cannot enforce human rights. You can have advisories, ambassadors and Ministers going around the world and cajoling states to do this or that, but they are not going to take any notice; why should they? Unless there is some sort of sanction of arms—let us be absolutely frank about this—behind our determination to restore human rights, they will not be honoured.

The only thing on which I would disagree with my noble friend Lord Parekh is that religions have not always lived in peace with each other—in fact, hardly ever. Eras of religious peace are rare; religious tolerance is a rare thing, which is why we always talk about it. I do not have time to go into examples, but most of the time religions are nasty to each other. World history could be written around that.

In this limited sphere, what can we effectively do? As in the example of Meriam Ibrahim, yes, if you can harness public opinion in a very large way, perhaps you can make a partial difference. However, our problem arises from the breakdown of the international order, rather than any particular nastiness on the part of any particular religion.

Chilcot Inquiry

Lord Desai Excerpts

Tuesday 1st July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I should also have acknowledged the important point that the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, made—that it is vital that we maintain and re-establish public confidence in public inquiries and in our political institutions as such. One of the biggest problems, which we all share, is the extent of public and media cynicism about the political process in this country. This inquiry is working with great care. Again, I stress that this is an independent inquiry—the Government are not in charge. The four active members of the Chilcot inquiry group are those who are responsible for what emerges, although of course a great deal of negotiation has gone on about the extent of publication. That is a very important part of ensuring that this is not in any sense a whitewashing inquiry.

On a previous occasion I was criticised by one or two noble Lords for suggesting that the Franks inquiry on the Falklands War was not entirely thorough or rigorous. I went back to the review that I had written in International Affairs on the publication of the Franks inquiry to demonstrate why I still hold that opinion. This inquiry is very thoroughgoing. It is being conducted by a number of people whom I personally trust and respect, and who are unlikely to be defenders of the “secret establishment”, so to speak. We very much hope that the report will appear before the end of the year; the Prime Minister has said that publicly. We are doing all we can—with a number of very hard-working officials, who are themselves doing all they can—to complete the final stages of the process of clearing these very difficult and delicate documents so that we can send out the second stages of the Maxwellisation process to those who will be named in the report. We will then move on from that to the presentation of the report to the Prime Minister and, we hope, to publication as soon as possible.

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, given the complexity of the process and the point that the noble Lord, Lord Owen, made, that we should not publish it in the new year, would it not be best to wait until after the election, when a Labour Government are in power?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we want to publish as soon as we can, and before we descend into the election campaign.

Syria and the Use of Chemical Weapons

Lord Desai Excerpts

Thursday 29th August 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, I have always been a liberal interventionist. If you live in a globalised world, you intervene if you think that something is wrong. When we debated this issue on 1 July I said that the question in Syria was not whether we were going to intervene but when. We could have intervened long ago, as the noble Lord, Lord Empey, among others, has said. Many hundreds and thousands of people have been exiled and killed, including women and children. We had perfectly good cause to intervene under the “responsibility to protect” doctrine. We did not intervene. We now face another opportunity for intervention, but I think that we are not going to intervene. It is quite clear that the mood of the House and the country is, “This is terrible, it should not happen and it is a moral outrage, but we are not going to intervene”.

However, we are going to intervene sooner or later because this war is going to last for much longer than we think. It is not just a Syrian civil war. As I said last time, this is part of a 40-year crisis of the Muslim Middle East and will go on. It is not just a Shia-Sunni war; it is a sort of rehearsal, like the Spanish Civil War, for the bigger conflagration that is about to come. We should therefore dread the possibility that the UN inspectors will find evidence and that perhaps the UN Security Council will co-operate. Then we will intervene. All the consequences that people have mentioned regarding what will happen if we intervene—all the side-effects and responses—will happen, even if there is full legitimacy for our move. In war, there are no clear, clean outcomes. The Second World War, which was the last, as it were, just war, was full of mistakes on all sides. There were the most God-awful tragedies, but we still respect that war because the end result was better than when it started.

What has finally come out in Iraq is a Shia majority and democracy—the only one in the Middle East. We got that regime change. In that debate, I said that I did not care about weapons of mass destruction; I cared that Saddam Hussein was a danger to his own people. That was why I wanted us to go into Iraq. I am a liberal interventionist. The whole problem is that the US and UK have created this structure for international order, which we have been embellishing by duties such as the “responsibility to protect”. We have now lost the will to sustain it. We may have also lost the power to sustain it, but we have certainly lost the will to sustain it. Red lines can be drawn, but red lines will be withdrawn and then drawn somewhere else.

We have now perhaps to rethink our entire doctrine. International order is a global public good. Do we have the strength and resources to provide it and protect it? We will have to come to the conclusion very soon that, even together with America and France, we do not have the will or the power to sustain the global public good we created. The noble Lord, Lord Howell, asked why the eastern powers are not intervening. They did not create this order; they do not care for this order; why should they defend this order? It is our responsibility, but we will not defend it. It is clear to me that the poor Prime Minister, on holiday, when the blood rushed to his head, thought, “My God, I must intervene”. I think that he should not go on holidays and then we may have a better world.

What we are facing now is that we are chickening out and that we will intervene the next time when circumstances will be much more against us. That will happen when this general war in the Middle East touches Israel. When Israel is under threat, that is the final red line that America will draw. That is when it will go and then we will be in a much worse circumstance than we are in right now. We will have another debate then.

House of Lords Reform Bill [HL]

Lord Desai Excerpts

Friday 10th February 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack]

I support what the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, has said. However, I ask my noble friend on the Front Bench and my noble friend Lord Steel to consider very carefully what the noble Lord, Lord True, has said, bearing in mind that the power of the Commons to expel, which it does have, is the power to expel from that particular Parliament. Expulsion from this place could be something very different. If we are to try to equate our rules with those of the other place, so far as they can be equated, all those things should be borne carefully in mind. That is why the offer of the noble Lord, Lord True, to withdraw his amendment should be accepted so that sensible discussions can take place on this issue.

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, I make the same request to the noble Lord, Lord True. Amendment 280, which was moved but later withdrawn by the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, proposes that there should be a right of appeal in case something is not quite right. We must always take the charitable view that if someone cannot pay back what they owe, there may be a reason for that other than intent. We ought to allow room for exceptions in certain circumstances.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I take up the cue provided by the noble Lord, Lord Grocott—I think we are within sight of a relatively limited Act that would command consensus all round the House. However, this proposed new clause would take us beyond the possibility of consensus at present. I think it would be appropriate if the noble Lord, Lord True, would withdraw the amendment. Certainly, I think that a number of us may wish to look at this particularly complex additional matter, but it is important to make some limited progress. I see that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, nods his head. That may be the best way forward.

Constitutional Change: Constitution Committee Report

Lord Desai Excerpts

Wednesday 7th December 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth. I welcome the report so ably introduced by my noble friend Lady Jay of Paddington.

I start with what the noble Lord, Lord Norton, said about the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill 2006. I recall that when the Bill was before your Lordships' House, it introduced a schedule of constitutionally significant Acts by way of saying that these are the Acts that shall not be amended lightly. I have always thought that that was a good device. The committee has difficulty in saying what the content of our constitution is. I offer Members of this Committee the following mental experiment. Suppose a country wanted to join the United Kingdom. What is the acquis britannique that it would have to abide by? That is in the constitution.

Suppose that Ireland, for obvious reasons, wanted to come back into the United Kingdom. What would we say that Ireland had to abide by? What would be the corpus of legislation? That is in the constitution. It is not unwritten at all. It is written down and available. The only sense that it is unwritten is that it is easy to amend.

We are now engaged in an exercise that says an unwritten constitution may be easy to amend. We may have a Crown in Parliament as sovereign and by that we now mean the House of Commons is sovereign and the Executive are even more sovereign than before. So it would be very easy for the Executive to do whatever they like. How can we introduce speed breakers in certain pieces of legislation to stop the Executive from getting away with whatever they get away with?

The noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, has already referred to this great experiment in which my Government, because it could not sack the Lord Chancellor, tried to abolish the office itself in the course of an afternoon. Not only did they not consult anybody but nobody told the Government that it could not be done without proper legislation. I remember being in the Chamber and the noble Earl, Lord Onslow, was beside himself with rage at what had happened. He had the House adjourned and insisted that the Leader of the House come to explain what had happened. Of course, the Government had to find a new pair of tights to fit my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer because they did not realise that if he had not presided over the next day’s proceedings the House of Lords would not have been able to function.

This is the degree to which the Executive have got so above themselves—the executives of all parties. They do not even bother to find out what the constitution is and whether it can be amended. We have to welcome this report because it says you can and should make a distinction between legislation that is of constitutional significance and that which is not. Although none of this is watertight—that is the nature of the case—it is still a distinction worth making for two reasons. First, let us be quite sure that there is a corpus of legislation that should not lightly be amended, and secondly, if you are going to introduce something new, you want to know whether it is going to be of constitutional significance. Right now, we have not got a watertight criterion for judging a priori before a Bill arrives so that we can say to the Government that we consider it to be of constitutional significance. The Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill was an interesting example. It is probably one of the most profound changes we have made to the way the House of Commons is elected, but it was not thought to be a constitutional Bill. Obviously, the Government care only about timetabling legislation in the House of Commons and very little else, so they are reluctant to call a Bill a constitutional Bill because the Committee stage would have to be taken on the Floor of the House of Commons, and that is expensive in terms of time. However, that should not be the only reason why Governments decide that things are not of constitutional significance. The PVSC Bill was a very important Bill, and in the House of Lords we tried, much to the annoyance of the Government, to prolong the discussion through various amendments, and I think we were right to do so. It was a pity that it was not given the importance it should have been given. That is definitely worth saying.

The Government might think of having a Joint Committee of both Houses of Parliament, perhaps a Joint Select Committee on the constitution, for Bills that they think are of constitutional significance or of having a standing committee that receives all Bills. If the committee declares beforehand that it thinks a Bill is of constitutional significance, it is up to the Executive to give cogent reasons why they disagree with the committee and then face the music. I think that sooner or later we will need a much more organised system for making constitutional change than we have at present.

Finally, I am looking forward to a reformed House of Lords. If the House of Lords is elected, that will be another speed break on the Executive, whatever majority they have in the House of Commons. I hope that the House of Lords increases its legitimacy and puts a stop to the way Executives carry on. It is about time we had properly behaved Executives in this country.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the question of constitutional change is one that we will continue to argue over, and the definition of what is constitutional and is not constitutional is something that evolves through debate and argument in Parliament as well as in academic seminars. Most of us think that we know what is constitutional when we see it, but sometimes we disagree with each other.

[Lord Desai]

The Minister describes how exemplary the Government have been about the House of Lords Reform Bill, although they were was in a great hurry to do the other Bills. Would it be right to conclude that the Government will abide by the rules when that does not bother people in the recent past, but that if it was the past they will not call it constitutional?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the Government, as I hear the Leader of this House say frequently, are strongly committed to the process of House of Lords reform. We will bring a Bill before the House and we look forward to the welcome that it will receive from the House’s resident constitutional experts.