 Welcome to this 11th meeting of the Vocality and Human Rights Committee in 2018. I can make the usual request that mobile devices are switched on to electronic mode, I was going to say airplane mode, and off the tables please. We should have David Torrance with us here this morning, and hopefully he will be here in a few minutes, and Jamie Greene is running a wee bit late and should be here with us this morning. Our committee adviser, Maria Hunt, who is not with us in the room but is listening online to keep us abreast of the proceedings this morning. The first agenda item is a continuation of our human rights in the Scottish Parliament inquiry. Our first panel this morning, we have two panels this morning, a small but beautiful panel, and then a much larger panel later, who will probably just be equally as beautiful. But on our first panel this morning, we have Nick Hobbs, who is the head of advice and investigations at the Children and Young People's Commissioner's Office. Nora Urig, is that the correct pronunciation? Excellent. He is a senior associate at programs Scotland, Equality and Human Rights Commission, and Judith Robison, who is the chair of the Scottish Human Rights Commission. We will be joined by Mary Anderson, who is a Northern Ireland Public Services ombudsman, but again just running a wee bit late. It seems that Edinburgh traffic is against everyone this morning. We are really grateful for you to come along to the committee this morning. I know that you have all been keen to take part in this inquiry, and we are keen to hear from you too. Can we say a grateful thanks for the written evidence that we have had so far, but we are really keen to interrogate some of those avenues this morning. Now, we have a tight timescale this morning. We have about 55 minutes with you, and then a second panel, as I said, and then some other work of the committee to do. So I am going to go straight into questions, but it is a general opening question, so I will give you a chance to say a wee bit about yourself, your organisation and the reasons why this inquiry is important. I am going to start with Gail Ross. Thank you, convener. Good morning, panel. When I go round my constituency and I speak to my constituents and I ask them what does human rights mean to you, a lot of them think that human rights is something that happens to other people. The starter question is, how do we embed human rights in society? Particularly in the submissions, I noticed that there were quite a few recommendations as to how we start, especially in the younger years, children and school age years. How do we get the message out there that human rights is for everyone? I will start it. Great. Thank you for the question. This is the work of the inquiry, to be honest. For this specific context, we are looking at the role of the Parliament in exactly that process, and I think that many of the questions of the inquiry address exactly that point. For me, the question in this context is one of leadership. The leadership coming from the Parliament and the Government in Scotland express the language of human rights, using the language of human rights, supporting people to understand that human rights are universal. We all have all the rights. They are not something for any particular group of individual, and when it comes to having conversations about human rights, the more we, as leaders within our societies, can bring the express understanding of the human rights framework, what it brings, what it means for people, the more we will be able to enable our citizens, our constituents, the population at large, to understand exactly that, that human rights are universal. We have made some specific suggestions in relation to the leadership that this committee can provide. The Parliament's role in that is really significant. It already plays a role, and part of this process is to strengthen that role. Internationally, the recognition of parliaments and the role of parliaments in bringing that issue to people's attention has been increasingly recognised. Council of Europe, United Nations and the Commonwealth are all saying that the parliaments have a lot of work to do in that regard and can play that role. Both whether it be scrutiny of legislation, whether it be looking, bringing into play the treaty body processes from the UN into much more into our public narrative and consciousness, supporting civil society organisations to do that and, for example, scrutiny of the budget from a human rights perspective. All those processes that are intrinsic to the parliaments day-to-day running have the potential to incorporate human rights into their thinking and into their analysis. There is not a single answer to your question. From the perspective of this inquiry, there are a range of initiatives that the Parliament and the committee, for example, could undertake. I am assuming that, in the course of the evidence, we can unpack a few more of them in detail. One of the key objectives in the commissioners' revised strategic plan, which we laid before parliaments in March with the help of our amazing new advisers, and I believe that Gail Ross was there, is to create a culture of children's human rights in Scotland. We very much welcome the committee's inquiry and the recognition that all of us on this panel and around the table share of the important role that the Scottish Parliament can play as a human rights guarantor. In working towards that goal, it is important to recognise, as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child does, that children do not have the same economic or political power as adults. That means that the Parliament has to pay particular attention to their rights and to ensure that they are fully and meaningfully involved in decision making on all matters affecting them. The UN committee makes very clear that, when we are considering all matters affecting the child, we have to understand that in its broadest sense. That means that all of the Parliament's committees are going to be considering issues that engage children's human rights. I agree with the great deal of what Judith said. There is a real opportunity for this committee to become a centre of excellence, if you like, for human rights in the Scottish Parliament. We have to ensure that we improve the scope for children's participation, the processes across the whole range of the Parliament's activities and across all of its committees, and to do that in line with international standards and best practice to ensure that we mainstream children's rights considerations throughout all aspects of the Parliament's work, including legislative scrutiny and accountability. In terms of the question about how to make human rights meaningful, it is important to recognise that children and young people are living with human rights issues and the impacts of human rights issues on a day-to-day basis. That came across really strongly in the consultation that we conducted around our strategic plan. It comes across really strongly in every engagement and discussion that we have with children and young people, whether we are talking about rights to education, poverty, mental health—these are things that impact on children's lives daily. What is missing, I think, sometimes is an understanding for them about where the decisions that affect those issues are made, how they are made, how to change them, and, perhaps most importantly, the fact that those decisions can be changed and challenged. There is a really important role for the Parliament in terms of education, in terms of outreach, working directly with children and young people, and making the processes through which those decisions are made and through which human rights issues are given life for people's day-to-day existence, making that really accessible for children and young people. I would support what both Judith and Nick have said. It is vital that you use the language of human rights yourselves, that you get others to use it or other committees, and that you really collaborate. I think that when you take an overall approach to human rights and to specifically try to include people with lived experience, organisations that work closely with people with lived experience, and, for example, especially focus on marginalised groups, so with that, I think that equality plays a huge importance. You could, of course, look at the nine protected characteristics set out in the Quality Act 2010, but also go beyond that groups that maybe are not included such as asylum seekers, and I know that the committee has done some work on that. Again, I think that what Nick has said and Judith plays into that. Talk to these people, include them, ensure that when any activity you do, it does not even have to be something connected to this committee, but you, as an MSP, use the language of human rights and include an analysis of human rights and equalities throughout your work. Once you do that and you have established a process and get education on human rights to reach more people across Scotland, then, hopefully, that will spread out into society as a whole. Thank you. Marie, welcome to the committee. We are glad that you could make it here. I am going to let Gail Ross come back in with her questions, just so that you are understanding where she is coming from. Good morning, Marie. I was just initially asking the panel when I go and ask my constituents what human rights mean. They say that human rights mean something for someone else. How do we embed human rights in society, and how do we have an understanding that human rights, as Judith said, is universal, is for everyone, especially for school children? I just want to pick up that point about the group with the young advisers that I attended. I want to put on my record my thanks for their attendance and all the work that they have done. They were absolutely fantastic. How do we embed human rights in society? Good morning, convener, deputy convener and members of the committee. My apologies for being late. The passengers did not board the plane, and that is why I am late this morning. I am going to suggest to the committee what is not a novel approach but an innovative approach to embedding human rights. That is possibly why I was invited to speak here this morning. We have in my office in Northern Ireland a human rights-based approach, which is to investigations into our work, which embeds human rights principles and values in the work of the ombudsman. What do I do? I investigate complaints of maladministration about all public services in Northern Ireland, health and social care, and I have an extended remit in relation to education, so children and young people, and their rights are very much at the forefront of my mind. Traditionally, the UK model of ombudsman has not included a human rights mandate. I do not have an explicit human rights mandate. Nevertheless, I have developed, with the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, a human rights-based approach to my work, which is an investigation. What is a human rights-based approach? It is taking the principles of participation, non-discrimination and equality, empowerment and accountability, and it is making it real. What we do in investigating complaints about public services is to apply human rights. In real terms, what does that mean? It means more than simply using human rights language when I report on a prisoner who is complaining about his lack of privacy because he has had bowel cancer and has a colostromy bag and has to share with other prisoners. It is much more than the language of human rights. I am testing public authorities in Northern Ireland and asking them whether they have had regard to the human rights of the people who are complaining to me and this individual in a particular case. Why is that relevant to the work of the Parliament and in particular committees? All committees—I presume that in Scottish Parliaments, like the Northern Ireland Assembly—have a number of roles in making legislation, but also in scrutinising. In your inquiries mode, you can adopt a human rights-based approach. You can ensure that there is participation in terms of sufficient information that is given when you are consulting on an issue, sufficient information that is given and that it is understandable. Take the example of children and young people. I am pretty sure that my 17-year-old can tell me when he has been treated unfairly. Does he know about the human rights act? No. Fundamentally, fairness and human rights have a sense of it. Children and young people have a sense of it, but education is key. If you do not educate school children—if they are not programmes in schools, primary and secondary—about what the human rights act is in plain and simple terms, they will never be able to participate in decision making or consultations because they will not understand it. That is just one element of it. I would urge the committee to think about a human rights-based approach, which is not focusing on the jurisprudence of the European Court but on taking the principles of participation, non-discrimination and empowering young people to exercise their rights if they do not know about the rights that they have. Information empowerment and accountability. Fundamentally, my job is to hold public service providers to account. In doing that, I ask them where are your human rights policies and procedures and how, in this particular case, in relation to a young person, a 16-year-old who wanted to go to college but her parents did not want her to go to college, how have you addressed this issue? How have you allowed that young person to participate in the decision about her education and her future? I ask those questions and, in asking and in your scrutiny role, with a human rights-based approach, you can embed human rights. Thank you all for your answers. If we are going to embed human rights in the curriculum, the young advisers are extremely switched on, but they are teenagers. How young do you start and how do you make it simplified for children who are in primary school age? How do you introduce it? I think that UNICEF has, as members will be aware, a very good rights-respecting schools programme, and that often involves introducing rights issues to children who are at a primary age. As Sir Murray said, children understand issues of fairness and equality on quite an instinctive level sometimes. I do not think that these are alien concepts that we are introducing, and it is about the language that we use and the examples that we choose when we try to explain what those things are. One example might be that, as you would expect, one of the things that our office spends a lot of time thinking about is how we communicate things like the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to children and young people. One of the things that we often talk about is that we frame the idea of rights that are contained within those international instruments as a series of promises that are made by the Government when they sign up to those conventions. We talk about the commissioner's role as making sure that those promises are kept, those promises to children and young people, by the Government. We could frame the accountability role of the Parliament in a similar way to hold Governments who account for those promises that are made at an international level to children and young people. That is something that children understand quite readily. Mary Fee. Good morning, panel. My question follows on quite nicely from the question and the discussion that we have just had. It centres on children. Without full incorporation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, can we ensure full protection for children? I answer that. I do not believe that you can. I believe that you need to not only have regard to the European Convention but the international treaties. Can I explain the case that I investigated in the office? It was a case of a 17-year-old who had history of alcohol and drug abuse. He was just short of his 18th birthday when he was admitted to hospital following a suicide attempt. He was not living at home, but his parents wanted to be involved in his care and the decision to discharge him from an A&E unit where he had been admitted because of his suicide attempt. In that case, I could not address the balance of rights here without actually looking at the international convention on the rights of the child and the report from the committee and the advice from the committee. There is a balance of rights here. There was the parents' rights to have an involvement in the decision to discharge him when they feared that he would either abuse drugs or again have another suicide attempt. There were those parental rights, but there were also his rights as a 17-year-old. The issue of gaelic competency obviously was relevant, but the hospital trust was adamant that the young person's rights took precedence in those circumstances. They discharged him. Sadly, three days later, he committed suicide and died. The parents have found it very difficult to deal with that. However, when I was dealing with that investigation and deciding whose rights take precedence, it was not to the European Convention of Human Rights. It was to the international convention on the rights of the child and the committee's advice on that that I had to go to find that the voice of the young person is important and sometimes is supreme. I made the decision that there was no mal-administration in the trust's discharge in that case. Nick. The committee will be wholly unsurprised to hear me say that I think that incorporation of the convention on the rights of the child is long overdue. We are very pleased that the government is committed to give it some further thoughts and to look at options, but I think that that is really something that we need to make progress with. In particular, I think that there is something really important there about redress and about remedy and about making the convention on those rights justiciable. That is so that children and young people could go to courts if they needed to do so. There is something as well around culture and practice. Legislation on its own is not a solution. It is not a silver bullet. It is important and it is critical that we get the CRC incorporated into domestic legislation, but there will still be a great deal of work to follow on from that around really embedding a right to respecting culture and a culture that respects human rights and practice. That is absolutely critical as well. My personal view, and I will not surprise anyone on this committee, is that we need to fully incorporate. I think that to look at options, we cannot take half measures. We cannot cherry pick what we do and we either fully incorporate or would as well do nothing because we are not going to help anyone by going so far and doing nothing else. It cannot be a sliding scale of we will do this now and then in five years we will think about doing something else, and I do not know if that is something that you would agree with. As I said, you will get no disagreement from me in terms of the importance of incorporating the CRC as quickly as possible. Judith Ornora, I do not know if there is any additional. I completely agree. Ultimately, the gold standard of any international treaty process where all the recommendations absolutely look for full incorporation, for all the reasons that have been described around accountability, around the mechanisms of redress, around ensuring that across public authorities and the state and government, the state is held to account in relation to the standards of the treaty that they have signed up to. That is the point, is that we have already agreed to this process. Because of our system of lawmaking and governance in the UK, we have to incorporate for that to actually be implemented into our law. That is absolutely right. However, my only caveat is that I would not say that no progress can be made and without full incorporation. I would never step back from full incorporation, but I also recognise that steps can be made on the way. I would not say, do not take those steps. I would not say, do nothing or do the full thing. I would always say, take the steps if the full thing, and we would always advocate for full incorporation. However, in absolute recognition of how Nick has described it, the law is a framework and a means of accountability. It is very important, but without effective implementation right through the analysis, the mindset and the ways of working of public authorities in Scotland, it is not that the law becomes meaningless. The law is clearly not meaningless, but that is where the real impact on people's lives lies. As Eleanor Roosevelt said, in small places close to home, it is in those rooms where decisions are made, individual decisions are made about people, where you see people's rights either realised or not realised. Those decisions about are you as a Roma child in our culture today going to be able to access education or a doctor or a decent house. Those are rights decisions and applies across our society, not just for children. Children are amongst the most vulnerable, potentially, but we have very many vulnerable citizens for whom the whole of the rights framework—incorporation of economic, social and cultural rights, as well as the civil and political rights that we have—is a really important step. I know that colleagues have follow-on questions on that, but surely incorporation helps us in our scrutiny role? Yes, absolutely. It is a really important— it is the gold standard, but it is also core, so it gives you that—you can do this anyway, but what it legally binds you to do is to incorporate the knowledge and wisdom of the whole of the international standards. For example, we have been arguing, one might say, or debating or working on incorporating the right to social security into the social security legislation as it has been going through Parliament. The purpose of doing that is that it legally binds Scottish Government ministers to consider and take into account the right to social security when it is making decisions about all the processes of regulation. That has not happened within the legislation, therefore that is not incumbent on ministers to do that. There is no legal recourse if they have failed to do that now or in the future. That is a real gap in the accountability mechanism in the legislation. That means that the right to social security is at risk of not being fully realised, even though that is the stated policy objective of the legislation. There is a whole there. That accountability, the right to social security within that process, creates that whole. We would absolutely advocate for full incorporation, as I say, while recognising that it takes much more than just the law to ensure that people's rights are respected. I do not know if you had anything to add. The EHRC is supportive of incorporation in principle. I think that there are a lot of ways of doing it. I would just like to reiterate something that Judith just said, which is that a lot of times what is really key is how you implement it. You have mechanisms that hold not just the Scottish Government but public authorities to account and create a system where there is some monitoring process. It is not just something that is up to a specific public body to do, but that you are able to measure the impact of it and that people on the ground see a difference. Thank you very much, convener. Good morning to the panel. Thank you for coming to see us today. My questions follow on very much from Mary Fee's questions on incorporation. In respect of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, this Parliament and the current administration have been on a journey with the UNCRC. I think that the first time the UNCRC made it on to the Scottish statute, which was in 2014 in the Children and Young People's Act, where there is a duty on ministers to raise awareness of, that was watered down from an earlier draft, which had a duty to raise and to have due regard. That is an important distinction, because I will give you an example, a granular example, of the problem that we have. There is a question in here, it might not be a long intro, but this committee is dealing with the Age of Criminal Responsibility Bill, which will see one of the areas that we have been out of step with our commitments to the UNCRC rectified. Within that, however, there is provision to take children to a place of safety in the situation in which they are exhibiting offending behaviour, which is a police station. That is absolutely incompatible with article 37 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. If ministers already had the duty to have due regard, we would not have that draft legislation suggesting that we actually have children in a police station for 24 hours, because that is not compatible. My question is, if we are to make rights real in the case of children, as we are discussing just now, do we need to have a structure or a body within government that is checking all the silos of government to see that we are not making spectacular errors, which will bring us jarring up against our commitments to the convention? Nick can answer this on the specifics, but we do, and right across all convention rights, not just the CRC. At the moment, the competence within government would particularly rest around the rights enshrined in the Human Rights Act and the European Convention of Human Rights. Those are restricted rights, as in they are restricted to the civil and political rights. They do not cover the rights across either the Convention of the Rights of the Child or the rights that are covered by the international human rights framework, so it is partial. That creates a problem, so it means that the competence and expertise are not there, but it is not as rich as it would be under the European Convention. That capacity within government to fully interrogate any process—policy, legislation—from the perspective of the treaty is, at the moment, limited. I would say that that needs to be bolstered in order to ensure effective delivery around those recommendations. What is important is however you choose to do that, the responsibility to ensure that legislation is rights-compliant when it is drafted rests with the whole of the Scottish Government. I would agree that building up capacity, building up resource and encouraging those things to be considered much more carefully is absolutely critical. However, I would not want to go to a place where we had too much of a silo being developed in terms of those kinds of issues for any bill team anywhere in government that is drafting legislation that impacts on children's rights, an understanding of the Convention on the Rights of the Child and other international instruments where children's rights are held, is absolutely critical. You can access resource and expertise from elsewhere, but that consideration needs to be mainstreamed right the way through government. The other point is that it is also clearly the role of this Parliament to scrutinise legislation really robustly to look at the compatibility of legislation with UNCRC and other international instruments with those provisions to make use of the powers and the authority that committees have to hold Governments who account against the provisions of international instruments. I am all for building that consideration in much more robustly at an earlier stage, but there is also a really powerful role that the Scottish Parliament and its committees can play in ensuring that those issues on bills like the Age of Criminal Responsibility Bill are properly reflected and that children's rights have been given proper consideration. One of the ways of doing that might be to look at the children's rights and wellbeing impact assessments that are increasingly being done to accompany legislation and to really dig into them and for the committees to scrutinise those a lot more closely and a lot more robustly to really interrogate the work that has been done in considering what is the impact on children's rights of this legislation, what has been considered at that drafting stage and what kind of challenge does need to go back to the Government in terms of accountability and its responsibilities in terms of international obligations? Just to reinforce that point, one of the reasons that we are so keen to engage in this inquiry is because the parliamentary role and if Parliament brings human rights front and centre to its scrutiny processes, that will impact on all the policy development processes way before anything gets to Parliament. If the policy makers know that that is going to be one of the lenses through which the Parliament looks at legislation, it will have to do that in advance. It needs to be an upfront process as well as at the end of the line. We do not want it to come to the stage where the Parliament is having to do that at the end of the day. It will affect the whole process right through from policy development to the end of the point. All of that has to start somewhere. The Parliament is a really important actor in that whole dynamic. I should have said at the outset that I was convener of the Scottish Alliance for Children's Rights and worked in the children's sector for 15 years. Just on that very topic about how we stitched that thread of human rights through all the policy work, not just of the Parliament but of the Government when it is generating it as well, the committee is very good at generating outputs. One of the outputs that I want to see is a set of recommendations that we can take forward to Parliament and to Government. One of the things that we are getting around to is the idea that each committee will probably need some kind of human rights rapporteur, but does that need to be mirrored in the silos of Government as well so that when we have bill teams, for example, that there should be in each bill team irrespective of the department or the interests or the field that has an expertise or an understanding of human rights training and our current obligations, whether we have incorporated it or not, to the various international treaties that we are signatory to. My background is a lawyer, which I believe that the capacity building around human rights legal experts is very, very important. I believe that the lawyers that advise the committees that are part of the parliamentary commission body have to have that expertise, so that the capacity is there to enable the committees to get the proper advice that they need to scrutinise legislation. Capacity building in the Parliament, there are a number of elements around that, but certainly to scrutinise in order to ask the right questions and to test properly, you need the proper legal advice and you need that expertise. The other thing that I would say in terms of your comment about creating a body, ownership has to be spread in a small jurisdiction like Northern Ireland, for instance. We cannot keep creating new bodies. We have a children's commissioner, we have a human rights commissioner and there is a victims commissioner, so you cannot keep creating new bodies. However, what you can do and what I think is the example in Northern Ireland between the joint working between my office and the human rights commission is that you can capacity build and get that expertise by joint working with your scrutiny bodies. One of the things that I have begun as part of my mandate—I am just two years in the role of ombudsman—is that I have now established an oversight forum in Northern Ireland, where the human rights commission, the ombudsman, the children's commissioner and the equality commission can meet. In their roles, that is capacity building also to make sure that if prison social care is not being dealt with properly in by one commission or there is an issue that needs looking at in relation to children's rights, I have own initiative powers that that is being picked up. So capacity building around using what you have is important as well as thinking about are the lawyers skilled up. One of the things that I learned very recently, which I had to attend a workshop in the European commission, was that the directorates are all lawyers, so they are experts. They are experts in the field of agriculture, rights, environment, so they have the director generals and they are all lawyers. They are quite happy to give opinions that are close to what the European Court of Justice would say on particular issues. That is the sort of capacity building that I would suggest, which is use what is there. If there is an issue about interpretation or conflicting rights, use what is there, go to the experts in Europe and then ensure your capacity building locally. I had just a slightly different line of questioning now, specifically starting with yourself, Maria, if I may. You said in your opening remarks—thank you for coming all the way over to see us—that you, as Ombudsman, really are there to hold public service delivery bodies to account. What sanctions can you employ on those that you find wanting in a rights perspective? I can merely recommend, but if my recommendation is not followed for a change in practice or procedure, then it is to the Northern Ireland Assembly that I would bring a special report. In practice, 99.9 per cent of my recommendations—I have no binding powers, but in practice and there is a convention that the Ombudsman's recommendations are met—having said that in my legislation, in my mandate that I have in Northern Ireland, there are two external mechanisms that can allow individuals who feel that the governance in a public body has let them down around the decisions that are made behind closed doors, so that if I find my administration, as I call it, which is a failure in good governance, the individual can take my report, go to the county court in Northern Ireland, get unlimited damages and also can ask the court to injunt or tell a public body to do or stop doing something. That is a very powerful enforcement mechanism. I can also go to the Attorney General in Northern Ireland and say, Mr Larkin, QC, I have found systemic maladministration. There is a practice that is continuing, that is maladministrative. There is a failure to have regard, for instance, to human rights in a particular hospital trust, in a particular issue. I can go to the Attorney General and say, will you take my issue to the High Court and seek High Court relief? No other ombudsman, as I know in the UK or in Ireland, has those powers, but I think that, while I can merely recommend, I have the back-up of the courts and the Attorney General. I probably speak for the committee in saying that we hope that we can change that for Scottish ombudsman as well. Thank you very much for that. The corollary to that, then, and the other panel members might want to pick this up as well, is if we had incorporation, not just to the UNCRC but other treaties as well, your job would be made easier, because public service delivery bodies would realise that they might actually face prosecution or a challenge through the courts when rights were denied and that you might not have to make as many recommendations as you do. That is always a debate that we have. I think that having the law is important. It is always a starting point, but I think that the law has to be given life to by policies and procedures that embed human rights in public bodies. You have the law as a starting point, but there must be some clothes on that skeleton of the law, so that there are policies and procedures. That is where I as ombudsman come in in Northern Ireland, because if there is no policy around a particular issue, as I find in one case around primary school children, the allocation of collateral places to primary schools, the allocation of extra places was being applied inconsistently. One primary school was getting extra places and another primary school was not. When I asked the Department of Education where is your policy, a basic good administrative process, it had no written policy. So how do you apply your criteria in the decision making as to whether this primary school gets it or that primary school gets it? How do you apply consistently and fairly the criteria to make that decision? There was no written policy. I do believe that you need the law, but you have to give life to the law, and public bodies should be doing that in terms of their policies, procedures and processes. Otherwise, when it comes to decision making, there will not be the backup. Therefore, if there are no written policies and procedures, scrutiny is more difficult. Holding someone to account in relation to you, have you met the policy, have you met the procedure that holding to account requires that there is good governance that supports the law? I just wanted to add that one of the ways that we have been working is, for example, through the standards developed by public authorities in Scotland, by the inspection regimes in Scotland, whether that be the prison inspection regime, the care inspectorate, and building human rights into standards so that the conversations that are being had when places are being inspected are using a human rights lens. I do not want to speak out term, but the new prison inspection standards will be worth looking at in Scotland to see how human rights have been integrated into that process. Potentially, that is an example of really good practice, where you begin to see public authorities engage meaningfully with the material and use it to guide and then drive practice change within those different settings. That is a constructive, good practice example from our perspective. What I was going to add to that is that, in our submission, we mentioned equality in human rights impact assessments. That is one way for public bodies, for example, when they come up with policies to ensure that they keep equalities in human rights in mind. In that sense, it is very important to state that you cannot really look at one of them without looking at the other. When you look at human rights, it is important to look at equalities and the other way around. When you implement those processes or come up with them, it is really important that you do not just create a tick box exercise, so you need to get people engaged and think about the issues. Mary, did you have a quick supplementary? Yes, I did. It is a specific question to you, Mary. When you spoke about the powers and the authority that you have as Northern Ireland Ombudsman, how did you get named? Did the Northern Ireland Assembly legislate for them? Yes, they did. Before you follow up, could the Scottish Government legislate for example that our ombudsman had the same powers? Well, it is a long time since I elected the Scotland Act but I think that that is a devolved matter and I think that you can. It was as a result of a review and a reform of the office, which was long overdue. An external review report was commissioned by the former office of the First and Deputy First Minister. It sat for a while. When I became deputy ombudsman in 2009, the Government was not particularly interested in developing the ombudsman role, but I would not say that they were not interested in what I would say, because they had not got the legislative resource in the Office of the Legislative Council. We went and spoke to the committee and we asked the committee to use their legislative powers to bring the legislation that was needed in Northern Ireland to reform and modernise the office of the ombudsman and give the ombudsman the powers that they need. It was a committee of the Northern Ireland Assembly that developed and led on the legislation. That begs the question, Mary, in follow-up to yours to Judith, about the powers that you have. I have seen you nod invigorously when you said, yes, you can do this, which I suspect means please do it, but maybe if you could give us a wee bit of insight into the powers that you have and what you need to build on that. Our powers are, in many respects, for a human rights commission internationally relatively limited. Our general mandate is to develop public awareness, support for human rights and to increase public understanding of human rights. We have specific powers of inquiry that enable us to inquire into Scottish public authorities and their practices when we deem them to be at risk of human rights abuses. We cannot investigate one public authority. There are limits on that, so I will not go into detail, but there are limits on that. In addition to that, in power of inquiry, we have the power to enter places of detention, if that is clearly the subject of the inquiry, to investigate whether or not human rights abuses are taking place. We have the power to compel evidence. We have no power to make recommendations, but we have no additional power to ensure that those recommendations are being held to by any of the public authorities. Do you like to be equal to the Lord Advocate, for instance, the way in which he can go to the attorney general in Northern Ireland? To be honest, we probably could. I do not think that it is ruled out. It does not say that we cannot, so we could, but it is not mandated for in our legislation, but as I say, it is not ruled out. The final power that we have is the power to intervene in civil cases. We have no power to take a case. We cannot raise a case ourselves in the courts in Scotland. We cannot take strategic litigation. We can only intervene in cases from our human rights perspective with the permission of the court. We have only got a few minutes left and we have a tight schedule this one. I am going to move on to David Torrance, who is going to hit you with a pretty substantial issue, and you will understand the minute he says the word Brexit. David Torrance, thank you for that, convener. With Brexit less than a year away, does the panel think that human rights will progress the same as with the EU, or is there a possibility that there will be less than because of that exit? I am sure that we all have views. I will start. The European Union does is remove us and the legislation from the withdrawal bill. It removes us from the charter of fundamental rights in relation to the European Union, which removes a backstop of protection to our laws in relation to how we deliver and implement them. In strict human rights terms, the impacts of coming out of the European Union on day one are relatively limited. The risk, therefore, is what happens after that, because that backstop of protection is not there. We are no longer bound by the charter, then the UK Government has the mandate or the authority to roll back on those rights in the future. I am sure that Nora will be able to talk from an EHRC perspective on how they have tried to advocate at Westminster to prevent that. For me, that is one of the issues at the heart of this inquiry. It is not the only reason for the Parliament becoming a more effective human rights guarantor, but it is one of the reasons that, without that backstop that the EU framework provides—we are still members of the European Convention of the Council of Europe—increasing the competence, the capacity, the knowledge, and the skills of MSPs of the parliamentary system of government around human rights. From my perspective, that gives a general—well, it just increases that capacity so that when you are looking at legislative processes, whether they be one that is developed in Westminster or, more likely, clearly one that is developed in Scotland, you are able to see the human rights implications or potentially the erosion of rights or what we would be looking for, the development of those rights. That, for me, is one of the pressing reasons why we would be keen to see the capacity of the Parliament strengthened in relation to their human rights analysis. I will come to you first, Nora. I have a more substantive point from the back of David's question. I cannot comment on Scotland, but do you want me to deal with that issue? Can I ask Nora to just compliment what Judith MacDonald has just said and give her own points? I want to come back to you in a really substantial point as well. As Judith said, the EHRC has done quite a lot of work trying to ensure that the charter is included in the withdrawal bill so that it gets translated into domestic UK law. Part of the reason for that or the main reason for that is because the charter does protect certain human rights that we will lose once we lose the charter or there will be less protection for the rights that we do have. Beyond that, as Judith said, there is the potential for the UK Government to request on quite a lot of rights once we leave the European Union, so a lot of it depends on what happens after Brexit and the kind of developments we see after Brexit. I think, I mean, with a lot of human rights issues, they're so complex and they're so broad, so, for example, environmental protection can have a huge impact on human rights issues. It really goes beyond maybe issues that we first identify as human rights issues and looks at a very broad set of policies that might change quite dramatically after Brexit. I think that's part of the problem with this whole process, that there's so much that we don't know and it's so difficult for even experts in the field to get an overview of what will happen after Brexit, what is the situation, just because we've had these laws for 40 years and we're not really sure what will happen afterwards, what kind of legislation we will see, or really what the full implications of things are. David, I'm going to let you back in in a wee second, but Marie, the issue around about the charter of fundamental rights is something that was fundamental to the Good Friday agreement and the setting up of the Northern Ireland Assembly and all of the things that came with it. I suspect, because the Human Rights Act was a very key element of the Good Friday agreement, that's maybe where your thread is maybe a bit stronger when it comes to human rights through your public bodies, but I wondered whether you could give us some insight as to where you are in Northern Ireland on this, and obviously you've got the discrete issues around about the Good Friday agreement and the charter being one of the foundation pieces to that. As I recall, the provisions of the Northern Ireland Act 1998 that required public bodies in Northern Ireland to ensure that they complied with the convention rights, that that actually came in advance of the Human Rights Act 1998, so actually Northern Ireland was ahead at that point of the rest of the UK in relation to incorporation of the convention rights. What I would have to say is that Northern Ireland, the constitutional settlement that was achieved by the Belfast or Good Friday agreement at its heart, had the protection of human rights of all the people in Northern Ireland at its centre, so I do believe that legislation and whether the Human Rights Act is repealed or not is that there is a culture in Northern Ireland of rights holders, as my colleagues would describe them, as individuals being aware of their human rights and it being fundamentally part of what they seek, what they expect. We talk about mainstreaming, which is the real challenge, isn't it? It's getting a culture that respects human rights and protects so that it becomes second nature almost, but I do think that human rights is already, as part of the constitutional settlement, and all the great work that has been done by the Human Rights Commission in Northern Ireland, by the Northern Ireland Assembly and the other institutions, that I do believe that there is a mainstreaming of human rights. What I would say is that the challenge for Northern Ireland is around issues of ensuring that that continues and obviously what happens with the border is a political issue and one that I can't comment on, but it does raise concerns. I would say that the Chief Human Rights Commissioner, Les Alunby, in his annual statement recently to the Northern Ireland Assembly on the state of human rights in Northern Ireland, flagged certain areas where there were gaps as regards to the protection of human rights, so what is going to happen? Although there is, I believe, a lot of excellent work that has been done and that people's expectations of their rights being protected and them being able to vocalise that, particularly when they come to offices like mine, they will raise human rights issues. We can't underestimate the effect that the lack of resources has. You cannot underestimate where we have been fiscally and financially for a long period of time. That is a challenge. Leave aside the human rights act. If you are a health trust and your budget has been cut or your patients' demands are rising and your budget is staying still, then the reality is that human rights may not be at the top of your agenda. The challenge of the financial difficulties and the recession that we have now experienced for such a long time is a significant one, and then the competing rights debate becomes, we are trying to do our best, we are stretched, we are trying to do our best here with what we have got. That is just my reflection. Any other further points from any of the panel? Is there anything that you had on your agenda this morning, a burning issue that we have not touched on that you would want to say? The committee with the Human Rights Manual that the International Ombudsman's Institute has supported us on producing and it is an investigation manual with human rights screening tools that might help when you come as a committee to scrutinise using a human rights-based approach, if that is the way you want to go. Wonderful. We always like a present. We noted in our written evidence that the human rights mandate of this committee is only for the extent of this parliamentary term. Clearly one of our absolute recommendations is that that be extended in perpetuity, and we hope that that would be a recommendation of the report of this committee. Indeed, we noted that one very excellently. Nick Norr, is there any final points? Just one very specific point around the Brexit question, which was that our office has consistently had concerns that throughout this process children's rights have not been part of the discussion. Children and young people have not been involved, have not been informed. The commissioner issued a letter in partnership with the European Network of Children's Commissioners and Ombudsmen, which articulated some of those concerns. That continues to be a concern. The idea that children's rights have not really been part of this discussion at all, and that causes concern about what happens post Brexit. I have two points. One is on Brexit as well, so it is partly related to what Nick and Mary have said just now. Of course, we also have serious concerns around the loss of funding for a lot of projects, and a lot of times it might be things that are not specifically linked to human rights, but as part of the requirements for receiving the funding in the first place, you need to adhere to certain criteria, and those criteria look at things like accessible bus stops and issues like that. There are a lot of human rights connected to the loss of that funding. The other point is, I would just want to briefly cover the remit of the EHRC and SHRC. We are the national quality body for Scotland, England and Wales, but we also are national human rights institution just like the SHRC. The way we split up our work quite nicely reflects devolution. With a lot of the treaty monitoring work, we will work closely together with the SHRC. Treaty monitoring work is something that the committee should really look at and specifically focus on follow-up work. It is nice to get involved in the process with the different treaty bodies and the UPR process, but it is really important to follow that up. There are a few things that you could look at. You could, for example, invite the relevant minister to come to a committee session and question him a few months after the concluding observations have been issued. What are you doing? What have you done so far to address the various concluding observations? When you establish a process of doing that, that is something that the Scottish Government will anticipate and it will make sure that by the time it comes to you, it will have something to say and it will have done something. It is a really good recommendation and one that we have already started because we did have the cabinet secretary here and probably a running agenda item on the UPR. We have already started to establish that pattern. You are absolutely right if they expect to be here but we expect to hear some answers and responses. It is a point that is very well made and it is something that we are already undertaking, but any further advice on that would always be gratefully received. I am going to suspend the committee now, but I want to say thank you to our panel this morning. We are going into another bigger panel with lots of other discrete interests, but we are really grateful to you all for coming along to represent your interests. Marie, we are very grateful for you to come in from Northern Ireland. You have given us a perspective on how things are maybe done a bit differently elsewhere that we can tap into and use some of that for our recommendations, but we have great recommendations from all four members this morning and we are really grateful for that. If you go away and you think that I should have said that, please let us know because we are doing this inquiry for a while now. We are keen to hear all aspects and anything that you think would improve the lot of the Scottish Parliament becoming that guarantor that we all want to see. I am going to suspend now for 10 minutes. Good morning and welcome back to the Quality and Human Rights Committee. I continue on from our first agenda item this morning, which is our inquiry on human rights in the Scottish Parliament. We have our second larger panel with us this morning. We have a huge panel, as you can see, in a roundtable format. A few rules of the roundtable format catch my eye and I will let you in, but we try to make it as free-flown as possible. We have some members who, as you can see, are dotted around the table, who have some specific questions. If you heard some of the panel this morning, you may have some idea where we are going with some of the inquiry that we are undertaking. With us this morning, we have Gordon McRae, chief executive of the Humanist Society, and Anthony Horan, director of the Catholic Parliamentary Officers of the Bishop's Conference of Scotland, and Dalia Henry, director of charity services at Age Scotland, Allie Thompson, director of dignity and dine, Bill Scott, director of policy at Inclusion Scotland, Lucy Malva, director of policy and communications, health and social care alliance, Graham O'Neill, policy officer at the Scottish Refugee Council, Michael Clancy, director of law reform at the Law Society of Scotland, and Helen Martin, assistant general secretary of the Scottish Trade Union's Congress. We decided just to bring you all together because you've got such aligned interests that we thought would be quite interesting. You can see, actually, that you all have a very, very discreet role in many ways in all of the right space approaches that we take to anything in Scotland, so that's why you're all here and we're really keen to hear from you this morning. I'm going to go to an opening question first, but, as I say, just try and catch my eye, and when you jump in you can tell us a wee tiny bit about your organisation and then hopefully then answer the question. I'm going to start off with Alex Cole-Hamilton and then Gail. Thank you very much, convener, and welcome to the panel. It's great to have such a diverse range of experience and views around the table. This committee is charged with the observance of human rights in every walk of life, in every stage of life, and its delivery through public policy and the implementation of that on the ground. It strikes me that—and it has always struck me—that we have a suite of human rights that we look to international treaties for, which cover every aspect of our lives, save one, and that is the end of our lives. I want to ask the committee and the panel members present whether they agree with my view that should I reach the end of my life in unendurable pain beyond the reach of palliative care, that I should have the right to say, this far and no further, and be assisted through any means necessary to quit this life with dignity? Yes. I'm here, representing dignity and dying Scotland, and we believe in the right to a good death for everybody, including the option of an assisted death for terminally ill and mentally competent adults. What we believe very strongly is that those at the end of life in Scotland at the moment, there is a small but very significant number of people who are experiencing a very bad death. We have stories every day, people coming to our organisation. A lady recently came saying that it took her mum 12 days to die when nutrition and fluid were withdrawn. That was an agonising 12 days. She experienced endless pain and suffering that was really needless. It did not have to happen in that way. If you look around the world at the moment, you can see that many other jurisdictions are actually looking at what rights people should have at the end of their lives and are taking action, action that really needs to be taken in Scotland. At the moment, we know that one person goes to dignitas every eight days from the UK and figures from England show that, last year, there were 300 people of all the suicides that there were in England. 300 of those, that's 7%, involved someone who had a terminal illness. The fear of pain and suffering at the end of life are driving people to take their own life. We also have a situation where dying people's loved ones, their family and friends, can potentially be criminalised for the act of helping them with their dying wish, either through travelling with them to Switzerland or here. We don't have any guidelines for any loved ones in Scotland, unlike DPP guidelines in England and Wales. The state of Victoria in Australia, which is a very similar population to Scotland—7 million—recently took action and introduced a very safeguarded bill that manages to, like Oregon that has had legislation for 20 years, really empower dying people at the end of their life, while providing the very vital and necessary protections and safeguards to groups of people in society who may feel vulnerable by such legislation. On that safeguarding point, at the moment, there are no safeguards, other than a police interview after the act of death has happened. What we favour is very much a compassionate and safeguarded bill that would empower dying people, give them access to the human rights that they so desperately need, but also protect those in society. We know that it's a very popular campaign. We've got 77 per cent of people in Scotland really back this. We think that this Parliament can take action, it's empowered to take action and we believe very strongly that it should. Bill, did you want to come in as well? It wasn't really what I came here to discuss. We were going to be talking about human rights and how the Parliament could help everybody in Scotland to access those human rights, but we will have to reply. At the moment, there's certainly no unanimity amongst disabled people. I remember that disabled people support the right to die, but our policy position at the moment, decided on by disabled people themselves, is that we'd oppose that. On the basis that every bill that's been brought before this Parliament has had a scope well beyond what has just been described and would include disabled people with non-terminal conditions who are living in pain, et cetera. I really want to discuss how the Parliament assists disabled people to live rather than to die, because there are hundreds—no, sorry—tens of thousands at least of disabled people in this country who are living without dignity and respect because their right to independent living and to participate in society has been denied them. I think that the Parliament's job should be to uphold those disabled people's human rights, to live with dignity and respect and participate in society. Yes, there should be better palliative care so that people do not die in needless pain, but I would much rather this Parliament started to talk about how we uphold the right to life and live that life with dignity and respect with adequate income, because I can tell you right now that when 2010, 30 per cent of those on what was then incapacity benefit had thoughts of committed suicide. Now it is 40 per cent. 40 per cent, if every person claiming employment and support allowance has had thoughts of suicide and some have acted on them, and there are certainly documented cases of hundreds of people who have committed suicide due to welfare cuts. We are living in a society that imposes that level of deprivation on disabled people when they have a right to an adequate income. Let's talk about human rights, but let's talk about upholding the human rights. In the tens, hundreds of thousands of disabled people who have suffered a loss in income because of the austerity policies that the UN has described as a human catastrophe. If there was a human catastrophe happening in another country, we would all be sitting around saying, what can we do to alleviate that? What can we do to address that? The Scottish Parliament needs to address those issues, because disabled people are suffering in the hearing now in their tens of thousands. Certainly, I have had phone calls with people who have contemplated suicide because they have lost their welfare benefits. I have had to deal with that. I understand where you are coming from, but I really hope that this Parliament and this committee will take more notice if they need to live rather than need to die. Can I reassure you, Bill, that this is a specific question that Alex wanted to come in with? I don't like to use the word general, because I'm not a still specific, but there are wider issues around human rights. I thought that at the top of the meeting, we could deal with this one and get some of the other substance. Alex, you want to do quickly come back in. Just to reassure Bill, absolutely, we will be covering a range of those topics that you described. I think that we had a discussion in the margins of this committee when we were discussing this inquiry about the range and scope of this inquiry that it would undertake. We are covering all of those issues that you described, and we are doing so very thoroughly. For me and for other members of this committee, the elephant in the room is also the rights that are currently denied to Scottish citizens. For my part, and the thrust of my question is clearly that I believe that Scottish citizens should have the right to die, but clearly you may disagree. You're in convention now, Gwyn, you know that. No, that would be that as it may. It still strikes me as a missing human right. I want to commend Anthony. Thank you, convener. First and foremost, nobody likes suffering, and there are some truly awful cases of people who have suffered greatly and want to end their life. Ali Thompson has alluded to this, and I don't think that we can have anything but compassion and sympathy for those people in those situations. I think that this is entwined with the concept of the common good. I don't think that the law can really be neutral on this matter. I think that it either regards death as a therapy or it upholds the sacredness of all life, which Bill Scott so passionately spoke about a moment ago. Proponents often speak about a narrow definition, but we are hearing of people being euthanised for addiction to alcohol. There are concerns about people being aburden on their family, about coercion and so on. I think that rather than condemn people to unnecessary suffering, we ought to enhance the quality of care for the dying, which again Bill Scott alluded to. That is through investment in palliative care. I don't think that we should go down the road of making the vulnerable more vulnerable and of risking trust between doctor and patient or even undermining palliative care or, for that matter, the hippocratic oath. That is something that we need to think deeply about and hear all sides of the argument, which is something that I, if I am given the opportunity, would like to go on to a little later. I am the chief executive of the humanist society in Scotland. We have got 15,000 members all across the country. Our members very much support the principle of a dignified right to death for anyone experiencing unbearable suffering. What is interesting about the new role for this committee is that there is an undeniable diversity of opinions in Scottish society. Most research, public poem research, says that the majority of people in Scotland agree with the principle, but it is reasonable to reflect on the two bills that have come before Parliament and say that there may have been a benefit and a broader inquiry into the issue rather than just simply forcing a decision around a proposed piece of legislation. I encourage the committee—I do not think that the circumstances that disabled people in Scotland find themselves in—is incompatible with the role of the committee to address both those matters. We would certainly share the horror of the impact of austerity on people's lives. The challenge now is how we can explore where Scotland sits on this issue. I would argue that we have to take an evidence-based approach to that. I respect Anthony's contribution, but we cannot just rely on things that we have heard and there have been reports and other jurisdictions. There is evidence out there that, compiled in a committee inquiry, would be a very powerful way of allowing the arguments to be truly explored rather than to take some of the heat out of what can be quite a contentious debate. I want to give you a very quick response, because Gail Ross has got a much more general question, which will allow everyone to come in on the specific points, but if he could give us a very quick reply. Of course. That would be to say that, similar to what Gordon said, we have evidence, we have got 20 years' worth of evidence from Oregon that actually shows that this is not a law that affects—it is not. There has been no extension to criteria. Being old or being disabled would not allow you an assisted death unless you also had a terminal illness. Again, I would support a wider inquiry into full end-of-life rights, including the right to palliative care and treatment. We firmly believe that there is assistance to live as well as when necessary and when there is no other option when death is inevitable assistance to die. Thank you, convener, and good morning to all our panel members. Thank you to those who replied to that first question. I know that it certainly is a very emotional subject for a lot of people. As a convener, I want to look a little more generally on human rights as a whole. We have had a lot of good evidence sessions in the past about how we reach people in society to empower them and to make them realise that human rights are for everyone and not just certain groups of people. You have all got specific remits with certain groups of people in society. How do you reach those people to inform them of their human rights and, if they feel that their human rights have been violated, how can you assist them in that? You do not need to touch anything. You do not need to touch anything. I am sorry, am I breaking the system? Okay, thank you for that. Age Scotland is one of the things that we have been talking about a lot recently, exactly the principle that you have been suggesting, Gail. The EHRC in Scotland did a piece of work around what does human rights look for people building a human rights culture in Scotland. Our demographic is 50 and over. If people around this table like me are over 50, you may not consider yourself an older person, but that is who we look at. I am looking at seeing his turning. However, that people 65 and over were conflicted by the term human rights, which we thought was very interesting, but it was very important to them to talk about values, equality and being treated well. Language is really important for people and understanding what human rights may well be for them as individuals and, for example, care for older people. In Scotland, people have access to free personal care, but when that does not work for people, how do you have an ability to respond to that, what should you do about it? Advocates are really important for people. It is about getting independent advocacy, getting that kind of support. Certainly in each Scotland we do that work. We talk to over 10,000 people a year and over half of those are about free personal care when it does not go right. It is really important to do that. To your point, it is a principle if the Parliament took the approach of telling people what their rights are and supporting them to access that, that would go a long way to reinforcing human rights for older people. I represent the STUC in Scotland, which is the trade union centre. We have 560,000 workers who are members of trade unions. We spend a lot of time trying to support people to access their rights in the workplace and as citizens. We do a lot of engagement in different human rights processes. We submit evidence to the treaty review processes. We submit evidence to the committee. We go and give evidence in Geneva when appropriate. For us in supporting our members trying to access their rights, one of the key sort of breakdowns that we see is that workers' rights are often not really considered within the human rights landscape to buy a lot of actors. Even though it is quite clear that economic and social and cultural rights are part of the human rights landscape, it is very clear that there are overlaps in various areas. When we start to talk about workers' rights, when we start to talk about trade union rights as well, in particular, the idea that that is seen as a human rights that needs to be defended is something that we do not think is built very well into the human rights infrastructure in the country. Take, for example, when the trade union bill was passing through Parliament at the Westminster level. It just so happened at that time that the ITESCR treaty review was also under way. We, for the trade unions part, were putting in quite detailed evidence about the trade union bill and about why that was a breach of human rights for workers in Scotland. I think that the ITESCR treaty review body agreed with us that it certainly needed more scrutiny and that it was certainly a worrying development. Organisations like Liberty were supporting absolutely the human rights arguments that we were making around that bill at the time. However, the Scottish Human Rights Commission made no comment within its evidence to ITESCR about the trade union bill—the words trade union bill were not used in its evidence—despite the fact that the treaty looked very much at trade union freedoms. Despite the fact that the bill was passing at Westminster at the time when the evidence was taken, the explanation for that when we raised it with the Scottish Human Rights Commission was very much that it was a very marginal issue. It was not necessarily convinced that there was a human rights issue there, despite all the representations that we were making, despite the comments from Liberty, and despite the fact that the First Minister was making similar points about human rights and workers' rights. We feel that there is consistently this gap between the view of the kind of things that would support our members in the workplace on the ground and the human rights machinery that sits at the top. Often, there is just not quite a read-across between the sorts of things that we work on in a day-to-day basis and how that human rights infrastructure supports us. Lucy, you wanted to come in from your perspective. Thank you very much indeed for the opportunity to take part today. I really appreciate it. For those who do not know, the Health and Social Care Alliance Scotland is the largest third sector intermediary for health and social care in Scotland, and we have a very wide range of around 2,200-2,300 members, including people who identify as disabled, living with long-term conditions, unpaid carers, but also a range of third sector organisations, community-based, right up to some of the big national players. We also have some health board membership, some of the health and social care partnerships are members, and we also have some corporate associate members. We work with a very wide range of people and organisations, and really human rights sits very much at the heart of the work that we do, which is primarily focused on ensuring that the voice of lived experiences is at the heart of policy and practice in Scotland, so it is very much a rights-based approach and a rights-based message. Some of the ways that we do that, or work around rights, is through publications and consultations events. We co-convene the SNAP, Scottish National Action Plan for Human Rights, Health and Social Care Action Group, along with NHS Health Scotland. We feel like we are doing a lot of work to inform people about their rights. One of the key questions about empowerment is that it is not just about informing people about their rights, it is also about facilitating people, facilitating and enabling people to enjoy those rights and to take the actions that are necessary to do that. That is possibly where some of the issues around the situation in Scotland, the key area, is around the implementation gap between the rhetoric and the reality. On paper, one could say that the language in Scotland is very pro-rights, and we very much strongly welcome that. Unfortunately, what we sometimes see is that that does not match what people's experiences in their everyday lives are. There are some very live examples in health and social care at the moment around self-directed support and the integration of health and social care. I am not going into loads of detail about that, but I am happy to follow up with some evidence around that. An incredibly live example of that at the moment is around access to independent advocacy services and particularly discussions that are happening in the development of the Social Security Scotland Bill at the moment. Our understanding—we are joined in this by over 70 organisations, including the Scottish Human Rights Commission and others—is that the right to social security, which is on the face of the bill at the moment, also includes universal access to independent advocacy, without which you might not be able to realise your right to social security. There are current discussions going on at the moment. Unfortunately, it is looking like that right to access the services will be limited in the bill, so we would be looking to see if we can get that extended in the real world. People with disabilities obviously need independent advocacy or want independent advocacy at certain points, but so do many other groups that are currently accessing social security entitlements. That is one of those kind of live issues and areas where we think that the committee and other committees in Parliament could be really playing a very strong role at looking at what does the international framework and the international treaty say around the right to social security and how does that actually play out in the lives of people living in Scotland right now? Michael Clancy Thank you, convener. I think that it is a very interesting question that you have raised about how do we get people to know about their rights and how do we get them not only to know about them, but how to understand them? First and foremost, Scotland's 11,000 plus, nearly 11,500 solicitors, are accustomed to dealing with human rights on a day-in, day-out basis. I say that because our legal system is based, to a great extent, on the implementation of human rights in Scotland. There is a troika where human rights, the rule of law and democracy act in concert to make sure that we are enabled in our society to fulfil our lives as humans. You talked about what is the connective factors between us all around this table. We are all humans and we all have rights, convener. I think that that is quite an important, although trite, observation. However, if I were to sit some people down in this room and shine a light on their face and ask them if they could enumerate all the articles in the European Convention on Human Rights, we might not get the answer that we are expecting. That is a possibility, including myself. Public legal education is something that goes to the heart of making sure that people are properly educated and understand their rights in Scotland. We have participated in a street law programme where we get young student lawyers into schools to teach children about the legal system and our rights. We think that that is quite a good process. Similar programmes could be extended. The Parliament itself has an extraordinary outreach programme. How many millions of people have come through the doors of the Parliament? How many hundreds of schools each year come through the doors? I am sure that the hard-working people in the visitor centre tell the visitors about the centrality of human rights to Scottish legislation. That goes back to the devolution arrangements so that, within the competence of the Parliament, it cannot make legislation that is incompatible with the convention rights. That is where, prior to devolution, because of the nature of legislation from the UK Parliament, you knew that that was the law. You cannot undermine the UK legislation prior to devolution, but with the Scottish Parliament and its competence provisions, you have to ask the question when you see an act of the Scottish Parliament, you have to ask the question, is this the law? Is it compatible with human rights or EU law for the time being and all the other restrictions and compatibility? Therefore, I think that that is quite important for us to remember that it is at the foundation base. It is a question that we all have to ask ourselves. It is the legislation that we are seeing enacted in Scotland compatible with human rights. If it is, as most of it has been, we can have confidence that those rights, as they are defined in terms of the ECHR, are being respected. I just wanted to pick up on that. I was in L-Iron and I heard something that Judith Robertson said as well. One of the issues around how we empower people to use their rights is about making sure that we do not place too much of a burden on the individual at times to be the only person who can pursue them through the legal system. In the human society, we have had some direct experience of that when we sought to take a judicial review of a decision around the rights of young people to opt out of religious observance. We effectively, to taste the human rights elements of that, had to be a child who would take the case—a case that could have lasted longer than they would have been denied their rights. By the time that the case had been called, they would have had that right anyway. We also see it on the issue around something that the ECHRC has identified around the effect of veto that some religious bodies have over teacher recruitment. That is something that the ECHRC has said that it wants to test in court but cannot find a teacher who is prepared to go and be that test case. I think that there are occasions where we should be looking at how we can better test the gaps in legislation and how we can make sure that culturally we view that as a constructive partnership between whether it is civic society or a Government so that it is not seen as a confrontation because someone wants to take a case in principle. We would certainly be supportive of enhancing powers for strategic litigation for the human rights bodies in Scotland to allow that process to take place, because that means that the rights are available to people when they need them. Education takes you so far, you can know about them, but can you manifest those rights, can you exercise those rights? That has to be the test. That is an excellent and interesting aspect for the committee to look at. I am going to go to Mary Fee now because her question follows on from all of this and I will allow some of the other panel members to come in. Can I start by making an apology to everyone who has come along this morning? I have to leave in about 10 minutes because I have a meeting to go to, so I am grateful to have the opportunity to ask what is quite a wide-ranging question that would apply to any committee across this Parliament when we are doing any piece of scrutiny work. All of you around this table represent different areas. You all have regard to different parts of human rights, but you all have an underlying obligation to everyone's human rights. As a Parliament and as an individual committee, how does each committee when doing its scrutiny work ensure that, although we take regard of one aspect of human rights, we do not ignore another one? If you have a panel in front of you, there will be a number of different competing human rights. If anyone was at the previous panel, you will have heard the discussion from the Northern Ireland ombasman when she talked about the competing rights of a young person and an adult and which human rights takes precedence. That will be an area that I would imagine that every committee across the Parliament when it is doing scrutiny work will come across which human rights takes precedence and how do we ensure that we do not ignore someone's? It is a very interesting discussion about how we make human rights tangible for people. For our part, it really goes to the heart of the question. I was very interested in the previous discussion when we were talking about the idea that, if the legislation is correct, that somehow creates rights for people. We have to acknowledge the fact that we have quite a lot of examples of legislation being absolutely positive and absolutely correct, but the implementation of that legislation is not necessarily pure but not necessarily delivering on the ground in the way that it should do. A glance at the equal pay situation in Scotland shows quite clearly the sort of difference between having a right in principle and having that right delivered. We see thousands of women who have been fighting and have been taking cases and have been trying to actually assert their rights in the court of law, still waiting for justice. We have seen systematic failures from the Government, the EHRC, councils and politicians in supporting the realisation of equal pay. Unison has prepared a very good piece of research on exactly what has happened with equal pay in Scotland, which they have submitted to the CEDAW for the CEDAW treaty. I would really like to send a copy to the committee for it, because it sets out the timeline in quite some detail from the 1990s right up to the present day of how that legislation was taken forward. It shows just how systematic the feelings really were and how many times there were to act to correct on equal pay, particularly in local government, and how that was not taken, and how action was taken by the EHRC at Glasgow City Council, and how that action was never published, and how that contributed to the situation that we have today, where we still have women who are fighting to receive their compensation. We have women who have accepted poor deals in lieu of what they were owed. When it comes to the question that you asked around committee scrutiny, and when it comes to how we balance rights, we have to remember that we can be seen in systematic rights abuses, and we can see them so regularly that they become part of the furniture and are normalised. It is now normal to see women come and give evidence to you to see them not being paid properly for their labour. We have to remember that when we are looking at things, we have to try to think about what the world should be like. We should be trying to think of the rights that people should have, and we should try to stretch ourselves to insist that rights are upheld in the way that they should be, because it would be very easy to just normalise the sorts of rights abuses that are quite mundane within our society. That would be my play to this Parliament, because this Parliament comes out quite well. You are one of the better actors that we have here, and you work very hard to try to uphold those rights and to tease out those arguments. I ask that you think clearly about what it is that you can do to try to take away that normalisation of rights abuse that we have in our country. We will be keen to see that submission if that is clear. Anthony, you wanted to come in. Bill, I have got you here. First of all, the church does not necessarily seek to provide concrete answers by way of specific policies and procedures, but we do hope to shine a light on broad principles and furtherance of human rights. We would proclaim the importance of human dignity, and, although we believe that that dignity is to be transcended and that it is rooted in God, we appreciate that not everyone will necessarily hold that view. Nonetheless, I believe that we can all work for human dignity and for the common good. The fundamental point here is that all human beings and their human dignity must be protected. Nobody can be left behind, nobody at all, and that highlights the problem that Mary has brought to light. I think that Dr Kate Boyle said in the last evidence session at the end of March that we can all agree on some kind of understanding of human dignity as a basic component. I think that that is an excellent point. It is a touch on the church believes that human rights are found in the natural law, so they are inscribed in the human heart. In layman's terms, it basically means that deep down every human being knows what is right and what is wrong. That might be alien to some, but there is surely some merit in believing that, at least in some matters, there is a universal truth that we can all agree on. If I can just very quickly give a couple of examples of what I believe to be fundamental human rights, for example, the right to religious freedom, people to manifest their faith, and the right to conscientious objection, the right to free speech—I think that those are fundamental and surely basic human rights in a democratic society. The right to life is another one, and Alex Cole-Hamilton at the beginning mentioned right to life at the end of life, but I will drag it back to the beginning of life, if I may. It is no surprise that the Catholic Church believes in the fundamental right to life from conception to natural death. It is an issue that attracts much controversy. There is no doubt about that, and it is a very sensitive issue, but it does not mean that we should shirk from it. On the contrary, I think that we have a duty to engage in respectful, but vigorous dialogue in order to try to get to the truth of it. I would like to see this committee and wider Parliament be more open to the views of all people with an interest in fundamental rights issues such as the right to life, just to have a real deep and meaningful search for the truth in that issue. I feel that there is sometimes a reluctance to tackle certain issues head on, and I think that abortion is one of those. There are reasons for that. Alex Cole-Hamilton touched on it at the last evidence session, suggesting that politicians traditionally shy away from controversial issues. It is very important that many politicians are afraid, for one reason or another, to publicly take a view on controversial issues. Sometimes you think, who can blame them? Some of the vitriol and the hate that public figures are subjected to through the media and particularly on social media is appalling. However, Parliament still has a responsibility, and it is a responsibility to have informed, respectful and honest debate on those issues. I think that that was never more evident than in the recent parliamentary debate that is marking Down syndrome away on this week. A very honourable topic, absolutely, and one that undoubtedly needs to be discussed. However, I must confess that I was disappointed that a debate on the challenges facing people with Down syndrome failed to face up to the biggest challenge faced by those people. That is that nine in every 10 unborn children in the UK with Down syndrome is aborted. That is just one example. It is highly sensitive. I know that there is a lot of emotion involved in that, but I think that it highlights the importance of why it needs to be discussed. I appreciate my call to greater openness and honesty. I cannot rest on the shoulders of the committee alone, but whether it is in the committee or in the main chamber, I would like to see more open consideration—an honest consideration—of all the issues relating to human rights. That ties in with what the question Mary asked, to make sure that voices on all sides of the debate are heard. I think that that is absolutely critical when we are dealing with human rights. Bill, I have got you next. Thank you very much, Anthony. As you can imagine, we are trying to hear everybody's voices around the table this morning. Bill, I have got you next and then, just so that you know, I have got Lucy and Graham. Sorry, I did not introduce myself properly last time, but Bill Scott from Inclusion Scotland is a national disabled people's organisation, and human rights is fundamental to every aspect of our work. We wrote the UN shadow report for Scotland on implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Disabled People. We gave evidence in Geneva, but to answer Mary's question, when it comes to deciding between human rights, fundamental human rights, which are universal, were devised after World War 2 because of the Holocaust, because the country is refusing to accept refugees and asylum seekers during the war and the results of that. The Holocaust involved disabled people as well. They were denied their right to life. They were forced to be gassed. However, when it comes to human rights, the UN and international society have decided that, as well as the universal fundamental rights, some groups in society need additional protections, and those are children, women and disabled people. When it comes to the competition between human rights, the committee should strive for equality outcomes for those groups that are usually denied that equality outcome by society. That means that, in some cases, you do not treat people equally, but you treat them with a view to achieving equality of outcome for that individual. If you do not do that, the inequalities in society remain and those people's human rights are being denied because they cannot access the same rights that other people in society take for granted—getting up in the morning, getting dressed, etc. The right to independent living does not feature in any aspect of Scottish legislation, but it is a one that is absolutely fundamental to disabled people. Without it, they cannot participate in society, they cannot take part in politics, and they cannot get their voice heard. We are a large member-driven organisation, with 40-odd disabled people's organisations affiliated to us, and the largest of which is 3,000 members. That is a class of disability alliance. When we take the issues of human rights out, we use the human rights toolkit, which we devised and which is an easy-read format, which means that it can be easily understood not just by people who are learning difficulties by any member of the population, and it tells people about their rights under the UNCRPD under the European Convention and under the Human Rights Act and it also tells them how to go about accessing those rights. Again, I come to a fundamental question here. Rights are absolutely useless if people cannot access them. I would very much echo what Gordon had to say on that about test cases and about the inability of people who are accessing their rights. 75 per cent of all the phone calls to the equality advice service, which is the national service to deal with 75 per cent of them from Scotland or from disabled people on disability discrimination. There is a law centre for women, there is a law centre for ethnic minorities in Scotland, and there is a children's law centre, but there is no law centre in Scotland for disabled people because nobody specialises in this area of law. I have to say that the reason that there are so many phone calls to that helpline is because many lawyers do not know what disabled people's rights are or how to go about enforcing them. We have taken this issue to the Scottish legal aid board and over and over again we have been denied a law centre for disabled people. I think that some of the Parliament should be addressing with the Scottish legal aid board is when are you going to act to address the inequality and access to justice for disabled people in this country? Again, on many, many issues we are being denied it. We actually took the bedroom tax case, not to the courts but to the UN, to the special rapporter in housing to get her to investigate it through a special inquiry where she visited Scotland, et cetera. Again, that is how you publicise human rights. You put the cases in the papers and you get people to realise that human rights are actually about basic everyday things in life like the right to a home and family life, which has been 80 per cent of people who are affected by the bedroom tax for disabled people are hugely disproportionate impact, nothing done to address that disproportionate impact. That is another thing that I would say in terms of equality impact assessments of pieces of legislation coming before committees. Sometimes I laugh and sometimes I weep when I read them because I do not think that they are informed by equality groups. I think that a civil servant sat there and gone. It is the same for everybody. It will not affect people disproportionately, yet it will. I have to say that there have been good occasions when we have been invited in equality groups and asked what the impact of this draft piece of legislation will be. However, there are many, many occasions when we have never been asked and I have to say that equality impact assessments I do not think meet the standards of human rights compliance. That is something that Parliament could have a word with Government about involving the third sector and the courties and human rights organisations in that. I speak for the committee here, and I think that one of the issues that we grapple with is equality impact assessments. We are now looking at equality and human rights impact assessments, and if we have not got the first party at right, then we will not get the second party at right, so we are very mindful of that. Lucy, if I can ask you to come in quite quickly, then I will get Graham and then I will get Michael. Yes, sure. Thanks very much for the opportunity. I think that this is a really key issue and something that we have addressed in our written response in the inquiry as well, so there is more detail in that. I think that it was noted earlier on that equalities and human rights are everybody's business, and so they do basically transcend every aspect of the Parliament's work and across all the committee's work. One of the things that we have asked for is to see progressive mainstreaming of explicitly dedicated time across each of the committee's and other parliamentary work addressing equalities and human rights issues. We have noted our support for the recommendations in the Michael Potter submission that was made for the committee as well as the commission on parliamentary reform in terms of providing support for parliamentarians themselves, but also for staff in the Parliament to increase awareness and understanding of international human rights frameworks laws, not just at the European level but at the UN level and what that actually means, but also the ability for committees, parliamentarians and parliamentary staff to avail themselves of independent expertise. A lot of that independent expertise can lie within the third sector as well, and we are always ready, willing and able to help with that. I know that mention was made earlier and the discussion is made about SHRC's proposal around human rights rapporteurs in committees. One of the things that we would advise about that is that we agree that that would be a good way forward, but we would need to ensure that that person's word held a certain amount of weight within the committee, and that it does not negate the need for all committee members to understand about international human rights laws and frameworks and so on. The ultimate point is that we think that one of the great ways that members of committees can find out about what the reality is of rights is to meet directly with rights holders. We've done some fantastic work where we've managed to bring together members of the health and sport committee with members of our lived experience involvement network, and we took a rights-based approach to that, so that involved supporting people with practical accessibility issues, finance to cover transport and overnight stays in order to facilitate that meeting. We know that everybody involved has a huge amount of that experience, and it directly led to informing the committee's work around NHS governance, so that was a really good bit of work. The final point is that for all of this to happen you could rely on it just happening organically through osmosis by some way through this kind of debate and other on-going discussions, but what we'd prefer to see is some quite concrete action, so a concrete action plan with smart objectives and perhaps some targeted focused outcomes to be able to work towards finance put against it. If it's not resourced, it won't happen, and if it's not counted, it doesn't count kind of approach. Again, I think there's a number of bodies that already exist, including within the third sector, like ourselves and our members, who are again very willing, ready and able to help with that process in any way we can. To introduce the Scottish Refugee Council, we are one of the main refugee rights charities in Scotland, and we deliver services to people in the international protection spectrum, so that is people who are trying to access the asylum procedure, people in the asylum procedure, people who have been recognised by the UK state as refugees, as well as people who have been refused recognition and therefore protection by the UK state as refugees. We also work with Syrians, families who have come through the UK state's humanitarian protection programme, resettlement programme now as well, and we deliver services and community engagement work with all those communities. We do a substantial amount of policy advocacy work, we work at different levels of governance, we work at the European level, we work at the UK level, which is very difficult and challenging for us, which I'll get to in a second. We also work at the Scottish level, as well as locally, where things are a little bit more productive and easier for us to get change and to get our priorities heard and the people who work with us priorities heard. I want to step back a bit from that and just to say firstly that we've really welcomed this committee's work and what we thought was a really well-regarded and impactful inquiry into the institution. It affects asylum seekers as well as people with insecure forms of immigration status. I say that partly because I think that's an example of the Scottish Parliament not being bound rigidly by devolved competence and recognising that, as it did with issues like trafficking as well, things that are asserted to be reserved aren't actually in practice and certainly not in the daily life of people in Scotland reserved social security would be another example. Also, when we ask a question about human rights and what can we do about it, inherent to me and to many other people in that question, and I agree with what Helen was saying and Gordon as well, is that we need to have an analysis of power relationships because that's inherent in human rights. If rights aren't practically accessible to people, then they aren't rights at all, and that needs to be the test that we work from rather than some theoretical exercise. I think that flowing from that is the emphasis on prevention and the emphasis on not putting the onus as Gordon articulated earlier on the individuals. There's no more conservative or small sea intervention that one can make as if he put the onus on the individual. If one looks at the history of any discrimination legislation, that is one of the key asks and pushes from all campaigners, be it from the race relations act, through to equal pay, through to sex discrimination, through to disability discrimination, so why would it be any different now? Of course, we're looking at what's happening at the moment, very topical in terms of the Windrush generation and how they've been treated by the UK state through its home office function, which is a little short of disgraceful, but I think that we need to be clear that it's a logical symptom, a logical product of the UK Government's hostile environment policy. The reason I say that is that this committee has, in terms of Mary's question, has a real responsibility, therefore, to adopt a relentlessly critical perspective, therefore, to immediately get to power and balance within society, therefore to prioritise the widest range of voices that it can, but particularly people who do have lived experience of issues. I think that Helen alluded to earlier. I think that the committee does comparatively have quite a good track record on that, but, of course, one of the worst things that one can do for a human rights perspective is to be complacent, so it needs to make sure that it doesn't do that. I want us just to focus on the asylum system as an illustration of some of the challenges that we're working with. We are clear at Scottish Refugee Council, and I think that we speak for the wider refugee and migrant sector, and this has been a real contortion of the universal human right to seek sanctuary and safety asylum within another country, which is bill articulated correctly. It was a legal right that was born from the international community's revulsion at the horrors of the Holocaust, but we are clear that successive UK state governments, as a state part of the refugee convention, have contorted that right to asylum, have made it into something that it is not, made it into something that gets such such negativity around it when actually what it is is something that we genuinely should be proud of and the people that are working making decisions amongst other things in asylum cases should be proud of, but we've reached a point with the hostile environment currently, which, if anybody looks at the UK asylum system, the UK asylum system since 2000 has been the hostile environment policy in practice, but now it's been given that name to a much wider group of individuals and people with other forms of immigration status queries. So, again, going back to the, in terms of how one can, and this is willing to get to Gail's question earlier on, how one can make a practical difference to that, is this relentlessly critical perspective, is this emphasis on prevention and not putting perverse owners in the individuals? But it's also about recognising that there's really practical measures which need to be taken, so there's things like advocacy services which are absolutely essential, we find that if we didn't have advocacy services across people in the protection spectrum we would not be able to get people to access their rights at all, and if we don't have those advocacy services then one of the things that that means is there's a decision which won't be articulated as such, but as the decision getting made that it doesn't matter enough for people to get access to those advocacy services precisely because advocacy services are a bridge in order for people to access rights, so it's very important that we're clear about they're not an additional add-on, they're an essential part for a human rights-based approach. In any community where there's always significant power imbalance which affects certain groups and communities, as Bill alluded to and we need to work from that basis. So, I think it's just to conclude to say that, you know, we're really welcome that the inquiries work in doing this, that the committees get a proven track record in taking this work forward. The final thing I just wanted to mention is that, you know, we're moving into a Brexit environment now, we're very much in that environment. For Scottish Refugee Council we're very concerned about that environment because that removes the sources of European Union Directive sources of protection for people who are on the international protection spectrum. Frankly, we do not trust the UK Governments of successive generations in terms of how they have treated the rights of people in the asylum process. For example, the asylum support system, aside from the denial of the right to work, the asylum support system says it's okay for people to live on financial support between 40 and 50 per cent of the social security minimum that everybody else. Now, what is that if that's not discriminatory, if that's not state discrimination? People don't need to agree with that but we're clear and we see the lived experience for children who have to go without and don't get the food, for mums who have to go without and don't get the food and nutrition that they need. Now, obviously, when Bill was talking earlier about, you know, what's happening in terms of austerity, we've experienced that in the asylum support system for over 20 years now and it's something that we need to name as a discriminatory system. Some would say a racially discriminatory system, we would not disagree with that because we need to think about, let's break the institutionalised thinking that we have around so many of our human rights as Helen alluded to earlier on in the asylum support system, we think very clearly as one example of that. Why is it okay that a child that's came from Syria or a betrayer of Afghanistan won't have to go without when a child who they're friends with at school doesn't get that? Of course it's a disgrace and it shouldn't be the case to give the Scottish Government their due. They recognise that and have tried to maximise measures to try and deal with that. With the Child Poverty Scotland Act, it's the latest example of that in the national delivery plan that's come out from that. We just need to be really clear, I think, of it as a Scottish Parliament, that its committee structure is a really, really positive and essential intervention to make sure that human rights are taken forward and realisable for the people that are resident in citizens within the country. Thanks very much. I'm very comprehensive all round there. Michael, I've got a time for a quick comment from you and I'm afraid that we're going to have to stop at the end that I know David's desperate to get in on the Brexit question, but Michael— To David's Brexit question. Go for it, David, quickly. Thank you, convener. As breakfast is fast approaching less than a year away, do the panel members think that human rights will keep pace with Europe? Or is there a chance of being diluted? The reason I'm asking this is I think about workers' rights and disabled rights, but also the third sector, where a lot of these organisations promote human rights but are funded directly from Europe. Gordon, and then Michael. And we're incredibly concerned about where the protections for human rights will sit after Brexit. Others will be able to talk specifically about some of those individual rights, but one thing I would say to this committee is to look at how you can maintain links with other European bodies after Brexit, including the bodies that the UK is part of. I would implon that because despite everything, the UK has actually been a very positive force on human rights at a European level. You look at what's been going on in Hungary in recent years. The humanist society in Scotland is part of an international movement around humanism, but also in areas such as Poland and the right to body integrity for women, where we have seen concerted efforts and are trying to twist human rights language to try and limit the rights of people in these nations. It's been the European supernational structure and backstop that has protected against that. It remains to be seen what will happen. We have to be sceptical about the appetite for UK Governments to maintain the pace of human rights development based on some of the rhetoric of recent years. What we hope is that the Scottish Parliament doesn't vacate the space and that it can find ways to keep those connections and be a positive force, not just for human rights here, but for human rights across Europe and beyond? That's at the current affairs committee of the Council of Europe, and I have no intention of vacating that position until they make me. I happened to have been dealing with the EUWB yesterday, the European Union Withdrawal Bill in London. I got the seven o'clock flight this morning to be here for this meeting. That is a topic that I have a great deal of interest in. We have promoted amendments in the House of Commons and in the House of Lords to retain the Charter of Fundamental Rights. We are quite open that that would be the best way for those rights to be maintained and respected. We have encouraged the UK Government so far not to a great extent to amend the bill, but we will persist with that until the bill is concluded. It is also important to remember that the bill itself contains provisions that would allow for the retention of fundamental rights and freedoms that exist irrespective of the charter. It is not as if the whole structure of EU law relating to fundamental rights and freedoms is being dismantled in its entirety. We have to inject a level of perspective into that, which recognises what the bill does do as well as what the bill does not do. However, there is no doubt that the removal of the charter from our law will result in an overall diminution of the mechanisms for recognition of rights. We have to maintain, as we go forward, into the transition and implementation period and all the other arrangements that we will have with the European Union in the future, such as the security treaty or the on-going partnership agreements that those things are maintained. I suspect that we ought to be thinking about how this Parliament looks at those future relationships not only with the EU, but also with the trading partners that we are going to have across the world. Of course, trade deals can have impacts on human rights. The UN principles on business and human rights have to be acknowledged. We have to be thinking about the application of those principles to those trade arrangements. I have exceeded my time, convener, thank you. Helen, if you can be really, really quick. We have some business that we need to conclude by 11.30 in private, so we are really pushing up against a way past our timescale. It is so interesting that we are finding it difficult to stop. I will make the points just in bullet point form. The first thing that we would say is that, for workers' rights in particular, we are concerned about the loss of the court. The ECJ played a really important role in upholding those rights. The loss of even that expansionist jurisprudence that the ECJ takes is one that we are concerned about. We are concerned about the direction of travel of the UK Government because we saw them on-picking workers' rights that were not nailed down by Europe over the past few years. For example, the fact that on-fair dismissal cannot be challenged until, after two years, the extension of that time period from one year to two years, the reduce of consultation rights, different things that they could on-do, they did on-do. We are concerned about that kind of bonfire of regulation stuff that you hear from the UK Government and what that means for workers' rights in the long term. I think that we accept in the short term that, hopefully, there will be a transposition of rights as they stand at the minute. We are also concerned about what happens with trade deals and the issue of private justice for private companies within that. That obviously can happen within the European framework, but we think that it is augmented when we are now a small nation state to conclude trade deals with big countries. We are concerned about the requirements that the USA would require of us, for example. Would that take away our environmental rights? Could it take away our workers' rights through proxy, through trade deals, agreed in secret with the state resolution mechanisms within them that mean that you then do not even have the normal rule of law that you can rely on? The question for us around trade is very big, but, in short, yes, we are quite concerned about what happens to workers' rights after Brexit. Thanks very much, Helen. We have really ran out of time now because we have a very important piece of work that we have to agree in private when we are finished. I say thank you to you all this morning. This inquiry is on-going for a number of weeks, and we are really keen to hear from all of you. If you go away and you had a position on Brexit or on anything else that you felt that you couldn't articulate this morning, please let us know because we are really keen to hear everybody's perspective in all of those areas. If you go away and you think that I am going to send a wee page or a half of a page or whatever it is, you think that we need to know, please do that, I urge you to do that, and we would be very grateful to receive it too. Thank you so much for all of your oral evidence this morning, your written evidence and your work with us on going on this inquiry. I am going to suspend now to get into private for us to continue our piece of work that we need to do.