ULLt ofical questions, ac we will move on now to our next item of business, which is a statement by Nicola Sturgeon on an apology to those convicted for same-sex sexual activity that is now legal. After the statement by the First Minister, I will ask the other parties to contribute and so there should be no interventions or interruptions." Thank you, Presiding Officer. I am grateful for this opportunity to address the chamber. The artist's show is widely available and it is an important milestone in achieving true equality for Scotland's LGBTI community. This morning, the historical sexual offences, pardons and disregards Scotland bill was published. Scotland has travelled so far in recent years to relation to LGBTI equality, that it still shocks us to recall that as recently as 1980, well within my lifetime, Llywodraethau cyfnodau a'r ffermwysig yn ei ddweud i gweithio cyfnodau cyllid yng Nghymru, ac y ffermwysig yw y ddyn nhw'n i'ch ddangos i 16 yn 2001, oedd yn y pwyntau arall, dydyn nhw'n i'ch ddyn nhw, aeth nid oes i'ch ddyn nhw'n i'ch ddyn nhw. Felly, rydyn nhw'n i'ch ddyn nhw'n i'ch ddyn nhw'n i'ch ddyn nhw'n i'ch ddyn nhw yn y pwyntau, digwn nhw, gyda'r adeiladau oakon hynny. The words inscribed on this parliament's Mace set out the values which we seek to uphold and promote, integrity, wisdom, justice and compassion. In even the lifetime of the parliament, this nation's laws have created suffering and perpetuated injustice. The legislation that we have published today addresses that injustice. felly, mae'n gallu gweldio ardalod argyffredigol aillol iawn i gaeliaeth i gyfryd y bydd cyngor ya'r bws grinddol yn ddechrau'rClif sydd wedi tystiolaeth, angen i ni fyddechrau seffol iawn i'r bwysig iawn i gaeliaeth i gaeliaeth i gaeliaeth i gaeliaeth i gaeliaethu seffol iawn i gaeliaeth o gaeliaeth y bydd cyfryd o'r liciwn, maen nhw'n meddwl iawn i'r liciwn. Mae'n dd調iadu yng Nghymru fydd ddarfod, message to anybody convicted of an offence for activity that is now legal. The law should not have treated you as criminals and you should not now be considered as such. Instead, this Parliament recognises that a wrong was done to you. The disregard has an important practical consequence. It allows people to ensure that their past criminal record will no longer have an impact on their day-to-day life, and that will change people's lives. At present, as the equality network and others have highlighted to us, there are some people who were convicted merely of showing love and affection to their partner who still have to explain their criminal record every time they move job or apply for a promotion. That is quite simply unacceptable and we are determined that that will end. The bill that we have published today writes a historic wrong. However, I want to go further today and do something that legislation on its own cannot do. A pardon is, of course, the correct legal remedy to apply for the convictions that we are talking about today. The term pardon might still, to some people, imply that Parliament sees them as having done something wrong. That is, after all, a common context in which a pardon might be granted. However, as all of us know, that is not the case here. For people convicted of same-sex sexual activity, which is now legal, the wrong has been committed by the state to them, not by individuals. Those individuals therefore deserve an unqualified apology, as well as a pardon. That apology, of course, can only come from the Government and from Parliament, not from the justice system. After all, the courts, prosecutors and the police were enforcing the law of the land at the time. The simple fact is that Parliamentarians in Scotland over many decades supported or, at the very least, accepted laws that we now recognise to have been completely unjust. Those laws criminalised the act of loving another adult. They deterred people from being honest about their identity to family, friends, neighbours and colleagues. By sending a message from Parliament that homosexuality was wrong, they encouraged rather than deterred homophobia and hate. Today, as First Minister, I categorically, unequivocally and wholeheartedly apologise for those laws and for the hurt and the harm that they caused to so many. Nothing that this Parliament does can erase those injustices, but I do hope that this apology, alongside our new legislation, can provide some comfort to those who endured those injustices. I hope that it provides evidence of this Parliament's determination in so far as we can to address the harm that was done. The final point that I want to make is that, while today's legislation does mark an important milestone in Scotland's progress towards LGBTI equality, our journey is not yet complete. Considering how recently it is that the laws that I have just outlined were enforced, it is remarkable and indeed inspiring that Scotland is now considered to be one of the most progressive countries in Europe when it comes to LGBTI equality. Indeed, one of the proudest moments of my 18 years as an MSP—and I know that one of the proudest moments for many MSPs across this chamber—was in February 2014, when people from all parties came together to support equal marriage. As all of us know, until we live in a country, in fact, until we live in a world where no young person suffers hate or fear or discrimination or prejudice, simply because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, we have still got work to do. That is why we have promised to improve our gender recognition legislation. We know that we need to ensure that it reflects the experiences and the needs of transgender and intersex people. That is why I attach such importance to the Scottish Government's work with the TIE campaign, ensuring that our young people do not have to fear bullying in school. That is also why we are reviewing hate crime legislation, to ensure that our laws provide the right protections against bigotry and hatred. That is why I hope that today's apology, in addition to its specific significance for gay men, sends out a wider signal to the LGBTI community. The Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament are utterly committed to delivering true equality for LGBTI people in Scotland. Wherever there are societal, cultural, legislative or regulatory barriers to achieving that, we will seek to remove them. We will never again accept laws or behaviours that discriminate against you and hurt you. Although today is a day for looking back and rightly apologising for past wrongs, it is also a day that points, I hope, to a better future. It is a day when this chamber promotes and can be proud to live up to our shared values—integrity, wisdom, compassion and, above all today, justice. Ruth Davidson Thank you. At the time that this Parliament passed equal marriage legislation, I commented on how fast Scotland had changed, was changing and that the change was for the better. I am not yet 40 and the idea that in my lifetime we have gone from consenting adults being persecuted and criminalised for forming a loving relationship to those same couples having marriage extended to them also is remarkable progress, but the jigsaw of equal rights is not yet complete and today we see a significant piece being added. In Scotland, acts that were consensual, that were adult, that were innocent were once considered illegal and immoral. Attitudes in the law have advanced, it is right that we offer a pardon and help remove criminal records that still persist. It is being called Turing's law and Alan Turing's case deserves its high profile, but of course the scope and the scale extend far beyond a single man, no matter his achievements. Most estimates place the number of men in Scotland who will now be pardoned in the thousands, both living and dead. To give a sense of wider scale, Stonewall estimate the number of men convicted across the UK to be anything up to 100,000. While the UK Government estimates around 49,000 men had their name cleared by the pardon in England and Wales that passed earlier this year. We are not talking about a few unlucky individuals, we are talking about entire generations who faced the criminalisation of love. My hope for those men and their families is that they now feel a weight lifted and that, as well as criminal records formally being wiped clean, any lingering sense of legal stigma, any last shadow of unfair disgrace is firmly banished. My hope for the young men of today is that they never know what it is like to fear their love being found out. It is striking that the progression of law across those generations is still relatively recent and, based on incremental change, the 1967 act only partially decriminalised homosexuality. Legal changes of the 80s and 90s inched us forward and in recent years we have seen the equalisation of the age of consent and the passage of equal marriage. Today's change is one such foothold in that advanced. If we turn to the detail of the bill as it progresses, our focus will be on the practical implementation and on the legal detail. There are two essential components of the change, the pardon and the disregard process where individual men have their criminal records erased. I believe that both aspects are necessary and right. We are clear that the record should be set straight through an overall pardon, but it is obvious that retrospective changes to criminal records need some sort of process and have to be managed. That is the function of the disregard process. The Scottish Government's approach, in our view, is proportionate and, while we will look at the supporting consultations and propose changes in detail as they are published, at this stage we believe the approach to be correct in its fundamentals. It is also reasonable to list exemptions to note that the pardon does not apply when the act still is a crime. That is only sensible and will ensure that well-intentioned bill does not have troubling unintended legal consequences. We will scrutinise the bill in that constructive spirit as an attempt to fulfil its aims in the best way possible. It is right that we find ourselves at this place today. It is right that men who committed no offence beyond falling in love whose consensual commitment can now be recognised publicly can even be formalised through partnerships and marriage have their records wiped clean. It is right that we apologise for the harm caused and I add my unequivocal and wholehearted apology to that of the First Minister. Scotland is now a better place to be gay than at any time in my lifetime and this action will make it better still. We welcome today's statement and we back the principles of the bill that it proceeds. I apologise in this place are often offered through gritted teeth and follow a period of acrimony where one party has actively pursued and proven a mistake or a flaw, a diversion or a hidden truth, even a scandal. This apology though is very different. It is offered with warmth and in the spirit of love and inclusion. It takes a deep breath and a big heart to say sorry for mistakes of the past and an even bigger heart when those errors are not your own. So I offer the congratulations and gratitude of these benches to the Government for stepping up and saying sorry today. We are of course saying sorry to the men who have been arrested, charged and convicted of loving another man. As we have heard already, homosexuality was only decriminalised in Scotland in 1980 and the law around sexual activity only equalised in 2001. That matters because it affects men who are alive today, men whose lives were destroyed by legislation that promoted fear and hate, laws that said that the love of two men was unnatural, something other, something criminal and something wrong, feeding intolerance and homophobia. However, it also matters to those who loved and still miss the men who are no longer in their lives, men who died with criminal records, men who took their own lives because they could no longer bear the shame and isolation that they faced. Our Scotland today, however proud we are of it, still sees gay men more likely to consider suicide. Stonewall Scotland's 2017 school report tells us that one in four young LGBT Scots have considered ending their own life, a truly shocking figure. In my adult lifetime, the cause of the LGBT community has moved from fighting against homophobia and demanding human rights to fighting for inclusion and equal rights. We should be proud of that journey but not complacent. Proud of how far we have come from section 2A through civil partnerships, equal marriage and adoption rights, the lifting of the ban on the military and the introduction of hate crime legislation. However, we cannot risk complacency and that is why upholding and applying anti-discrimination laws is critical. Ensuring that the asylum system protects those fleeing violence and sometimes death, those seeking refuge because of their sexuality and why we should wholeheartedly back the Thai campaign and their calls for a truly inclusive education system. Today is a landmark day in Scotland's LGBT history. In apologising, the First Minister accepts that for Scotland to fulfil its vision of an inclusive future, it must be at peace with its past. This bill will bring that peace by pardoning all those men who were convicted of same-sex sexual activity that is now legal. I understand from the First Minister's statement that such a pardon will lead to the crucial formality of disregards, in other words, wiping the slate clean, clearing the criminal records of those convicted so that no such scars of history appear on documents like disclosure checks. Today, we apologise to Scotland's gay and bisexual men for criminalising their love of sex and their love for each other. However, it is worth reminding ourselves why the apology does not apply to women. The reality is that it has never been a crime for two women to be together. The history books teach us that the law makers did try. In fact, the House of Commons passed an amendment in 1921 to make sex between two women illegal, but it was rejected by the House of Lords because they did not want ordinary women to know that such a thing existed. Very often, women had to pass as men to live their lives, and if they were caught, they were sometimes convicted of fraud. Most were not criminalised for their love of each other, but they were still punished. They were both invisible and demeaned, ostracised from their communities and their families, punished and painted out of history. Yet, through the years, women and men, gay and straight, intersex, trans and non-binary, of all ethnicities and races, all faiths and none have marched together, demanding tolerance and respect with pride and passion, and that march has led us here today. The apology is the product of their work, their sweat and tears, and I thank them deeply and personally for it. Accruciallly, it allows our Scotland to take another step of progress towards an equal and inclusive future for all. I am grateful for the opportunity to respond to the statement, and I very much thank the First Minister for having made the apology that we have heard today. I came out at a time when the age of consent for gay and bisexual men was still 21, where consenting relationships, normal teenage relationships, even as a young adult, just holding hands, would, in theory, have risked the possibility of arrest. I went to university at a time of the odious James Anderton in Manchester, God's Cop, who built a reputation for using his office to pursue his particular variety of religious extremism, calling for sex between men to be made criminal once again, and pursuing an agenda of aggressive and violent disruption of the gay scene in Manchester. Spin forward just another 10 years later, and I was working as an LGBT youth worker in Glasgow, and one of the last things I had to do before I had the privilege of joining this institution was a timeline exercise. From the earliest example, a cave art image from 8000 BC right through modern history, the young people who were working with were asked to pick a card, look at a particular moment in history and place it on a timeline. When did this happen, when did that happen? When young people drew the card decriminalisation of male homosexuality, one of the most common responses that we got was astonishment, bafflement that had ever been the case. Such a brief period of progress and yet, at that point, we had young people growing up without that thought in their head that they would once have been criminalised. I very much welcomed the progress that has been made and the support that has been shown across the political spectrum, but it is also worth remembering that not everyone will welcome this. There are those who reject the principle that Governments ought to apologise for things done by previous Governments or by previous generations. I am reminded of the last item, the most recent item on that timeline exercise, an apology from the German Government for those sent to concentration camps during the Second World War. It is an important principle that an apology issued by a Government is not merely on behalf of that Government, but on behalf of Government more generally and on behalf of our society. Parliament, too, has a responsibility to make that apology because, as Keas Dugdale reminds us, that prejudice, persecution and discrimination was not only legal, it was also societal, it was about our whole society. I offer my apology, as I hope we all do, on behalf of Parliament, just as the First Minister has on behalf of Government, because those laws, the persecution, were not merely the act of a wicked Government. While most of us would regard those actions as morally indefensible today, at the time they represented the consensus view of society at large, attitudes that were political, legal, religious and social, there will also be those who do not welcome today's step because they have not made that journey with the rest of society towards the abandonment of prejudice. There is much work still to do. The current climate of debate around the issues of misogyny and sexual harassment demonstrates to us how long our society is still capable of allowing and permitting despicable behaviour to persist. Even decades, even generations after progress, has begun to be made. Today's statement should be a reminder of this, too, that we have made great progress, but that inequality, prejudice and bigotry persist still in our workplaces, in our schools, in our media and in our politics. We still give those attitudes too much room. We still make excuses like matter of conscience for those who oppose equality under the law and equality of respect for lesbian, gay, bi, trans and intersex people. We still make too many excuses for those who even now cannot accept that same-sex relationships are equal and that the laws against them were morally wrong, not the people those laws were used against. Let us all recommit to continuing the progress and ensuring that the next generation has nothing to apologise for on our behalf. I thank the First Minister for making her statement and her apology on behalf of the Scottish Government. It is an important thing to do. For many gay people, the idea of a pardon carries with it connotations of forgiveness for a wrongdoing. The apology today from the First Minister makes it clear that it was the law, the enforcement of that law and the attitude of those in authority in our country's past who were wrong. Today we are all adding to that apology by reflecting on the wasted potential and the lost achievements of those men whose lives were limited or tragically cut short because of this injustice. People were imprisoned and fined. Their lives and families were in many cases ruined. Men became outsiders from their own families and from their own communities. Our country is poorer for the limits that we placed on those men's freedom. It is right that the Parliament stands together to apologise for that. It is easy today to imagine that this is all ancient history. Certainly when we see Alan Turing, we see photographs in black and white but the estimates are that most of the prosecutions were in the 1980s within easy living memory. With many of those arrested and prosecuted and those who made the arrests and led the prosecutions still with us today. In the summer, the BBC showed their dramatised documentary against the law, which commemorated 50 years since the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality. One of the testimonies was from Professor Roger Lockyer, who lived with his partner later, his husband, for more than 50 years. He described with great humour but also great poignancy the struggle, the secrecy and the injustice of the law of this country over those 50 years and the decades before. He himself overcame all of that to have an academic career of importance and achievement, one that increased our understanding of history. However, he also lived through and made part of history. It was sad to learn that he died last week, at 89 years of age, but having lived to see his equality recognised and set into law. Today, the Parliament shows respect to all those individuals who were wronged by our laws. In closing, I would like to say that individual human rights, particularly for gay people, are not universal throughout the world. In recent weeks, we have heard of serious oppression and mistreatment of gay people in Azerbaijan, in Chechnya, in Indonesia and also in Egypt. Our country needs to stand for equality and for respect for the individual, and we will not be able to stop speaking up for that after today. We must continue that battle for people across the globe. Thank you very much, and that concludes this item of business. We will just take a few moments for members to change seats. Members, I am just going to spend businesses for two minutes.