Labour peers vow to ‘pull Bill of Rights apart’

MAJOR reforms to the justice system will be ‘pulled apart’ in the House of Lords, Labour peers have predicted.

Lord Foulkes of Cumnock boasted that the Upper House was ‘full of lawyers’ who will try to defeat the Bill of Rights introduced by the Government this week.

He claimed the planned law will ‘reduce the rights of British citizens’ and also embolden dictatorships to ignore human rights law.

The Labour peer’s comments came just a day after Lord Chancellor Dominic Raab promised that the Bill would restore a ‘ healthy dose of common sense’ to the justice system.

Under the proposals, UK courts will no longer be required to take into account rulings from the European Court of Human Rights ( ECHR) in Strasbourg, which grounded the first planned flight of migrants to Rwanda last week.

The Bill will also make it easier to deport foreign criminals and let judges weed out trivial human rights claims at an early stage. But addressing the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe – whose court is the ECHR – yesterday, former Labour minister Lord Foulkes branded it a ‘misnomer’.

‘It’s not a Bill of Rights. It reduces the rights of British citizens,’ he said.

He claimed the Government had refused requests from three parliamentary committees for the pre-legislative scrutiny usually given to constitutional matters.

And he warned: ‘They’re trying to push it through with a majority of 80 in the Commons without proper scrutiny.

‘Well, I can tell them they reckoned without the House of Lords, which is packed full of lawyers who will pull this Bill apart.’

Another Labour peer also promised to fight back against the Bill, as the House of Lords had done recently against Priti Patel’s landmark immigration reforms.

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port said: ‘Having fought battles recently for the Nationality and Borders Bill that is now on the statute book, and enlisted the support of all the legal

brains, the best brains in Britain in the House of Lords as it stood against the Government proposals – only to lose the ultimate debate because of the majority in the House of Commons – we now align ourselves once again around this cause. But with different material to work with and different focus to concentrate on.’

Some Brexiteers expect ministers to deploy the rarely used Parliament Act to over-ride the peers’ objections and force through the laws, according to the Daily Telegraph.