Professor Bill Rolston:

That is a bit beyond our brief, but I will give the Senator some reply. I believe that the current Tory Government does see international human rights law as an obstacle rather than an opportunity. This is shown in various forms, the most obvious of which is the one the Senator has just raised, namely, migration. She may remember how the Supreme Court recently stamped down the legislation to bring refugees or asylum seekers to Rwanda. The immediate response by the UK Government was not to say it acknowledged its international human rights obligations but to say it would design legislation so that international human rights organisations could not stop it from doing that. I do not know what that means. Ultimately, the logic behind that is the Government will pull out from all these international obligations.

To my knowledge, no one has said that specifically about the legacy Act. I may be wrong, and Mr. Thompson might correct me, but there is a logic in there that says we can fix it to make sure it is compliant with human rights. We disagree entirely with that and have a lot of support for that. However, if it keeps being shown that it cannot be made compliant with human rights, it is only a matter of time before some secretary of state or other Tory minister says they will do it anyway because they do not want to be encumbered by human rights legislation.