Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)

I was trying to be brief—this is Report—but, with the leave of the House, I will answer, again as briefly as I can. I know that not everyone agrees and not every jurist agrees, but as far I am concerned, the margin of appreciation was always intended to be an international concept for an international court. Once you get to Strasbourg, it is quite right that a margin of appreciation applies so that Strasbourg respects the legislation and the jurisdiction of domestic legislators and judges. I do not see it as a domestic legal principle at all, so I do not see that it is for even the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom to be operating a margin of appreciation when it applies the Human Rights Act domestically. I do not see that as the problem that the noble Lord does. The way that you put meat on the bones of human rights protections is with the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, with the detail of the public order statute book; hence I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Strasburger, about having a proper defence to face concealment. That is the detailed meat on the bones, not drafting a right to protest that pretty much replicates Articles 10 and 11. If the concern—and I would understand this—is that a future Government will come in and scrap the Human Rights Act and pull out of the ECHR, why then have colleagues piggy-backed on to Section 6 of the Human Rights Act in the way that they drafted the right to protest? That is a mistake. I do not want to give up on the Human Rights Act and the ECHR; I will defend them as long as I have breath in my body. That is the approach because it is a hostage to fortune to have free-standing replication of particular rights in particular statutes, when we have the precious protection of an overarching Human Rights Act that applies to the interpretation of all law.