Hansard

This is the first stage in a historic process for the Parliament and for Scotland’s young people. It is an important milestone in the wider efforts to codify international human rights treaties in our domestic law.

I would be remiss, as a former member of the Scottish Youth Parliament, if I did not start by congratulating the Scottish Youth Parliament for having brought us to this point. Without its work and that of the Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland and many others, this day would probably still be some way off.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is a landmark document. It recognises that children in particular need strong rights protections that are tailored to their needs and which are, critically, accessible to them. What value are rights if children cannot exercise them?

The UNCRC incorporates civil and social rights together in one document, thereby recognising that those rights are interlinked and that children’s wellbeing cannot be assured without both sets of rights. After all, how useful are civil freedoms when one is starving or being denied healthcare? Too often, when poverty and inequality are widespread, civil rights are exercisable only by those in society who are already privileged—those whose economic needs are already being met.

Historically, many treaties have separated civil and social rights in different documents. An obvious example of that is the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Another example is the European convention on human rights and the European Social Charter. Separation of those rights has tended to undermine the legal protection of social rights in particular. Debates continue about the justiciability of social rights because they lack the history of court enforcement that characterises the development of civil and political rights.

The move towards neoliberalism and austerity economics, especially in the past decade, has seen social rights in the United Kingdom being attacked and undermined. Across the world, there are many constitutional orders that include social rights and afford them some level of protection. Unfortunately, that is not the case here, which is one reason why our integration into Scots law of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child is so significant. We have seen the economic and social rights of children being violated, as successive UK Governments have, for example, cut services and social security provisions, and introduced expanded conditionality to the welfare system. When cuts have been criticised by UN rights experts, the UK’s Conservative Government has, disgracefully, attacked those experts.

By placing civil and social rights side by side, the UNCRC seeks to ensure a holistic approach that upholds the wellbeing of children. By transposing the convention directly into our domestic law, the bill will open the possibility of legal enforceability of the social rights that are contained in the convention. It is truly hard to overstate how significant that development could prove to be. The social rights of children and young people are critical, but we have seen how easily they can be cast aside without legal enforcement.

In addition to the prospect of legal enforcement, the bill will introduce other ways to protect and uphold rights. It will introduce a children’s rights scheme that is designed to ensure that children can participate in decision making that affects them, and it will place a duty on public authorities to act in a manner that is compatible with the convention. Those, too, are welcome steps forward. From my involvement in establishing East Dunbartonshire’s youth council, I can think of a number of examples in which such a duty having been placed on the local authority would likely have led to different outcomes.

There are certainly areas in which the Government could go further. The Scottish Youth Parliament has called for the children’s rights scheme to be made stronger—in particular, in relation to support for vulnerable children. The Scottish Youth Parliament has also called for the definition of “public authorities” to be expanded to include private companies that deliver public services. The Greens are happy to support those calls, and I welcome the cabinet secretary’s commitment in his opening speech to strengthening the latter provision.

One issue of enforcement about which there has been significant debate is whether Parliament can, in essence, bind its future self by striking down new legislation that is incompatible with the rights of children. That was considered by the Equalities and Human Rights Committee. I appreciate its work on that and the valuable inclusion of the issue in its report. Several academics have provided particularly useful supplementary evidence.

Constitutional protections that override primary legislation are a central feature of most constitutional orders, but it is a feature that is alien to a UK that is instead—to our detriment, I think—based wholly on the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, and whose constitution is muddled, to say the least. The Scottish Government has opted for a system of declaration of incompatibility for future legislation, believing that powers to strike down future legislation go beyond the competence of Parliament. However, that view has been challenged by academic experts.

I would like a more substantial response from the Government. In particular, I encourage the Government to take up Dr Boyle’s recommendation to seek views from a broad range of experts in constitutional law. With our being so close to dissolution, there is a danger that the rush to ensure that the bill is passed on time will result in significant issues being underexplored. That should not be the case with a bill that is of such constitutional significance.

Although all those matters are of immense importance, they are also unavoidably a bit dry and abstract. That happens with constitutional law, sometimes. I do not want to lose sight of the fact that the bill will, for a long time to come, have a transformative effect on the lives of children and young people in Scotland. It will be part of the legacy that every one of us in Parliament leaves, and it will benefit our most vulnerable young people especially. I was struck by the comments that the committee convener, Ruth Maguire, read out, which came from young refugees in Scotland.

It is for all those reasons that the Greens are, of course, happy to support the bill at stage 1.