Clause 1 - Civil partnership
Civil Partnership Bill [Lords]
9:30 am
Mr Christopher Chope (Shadow Minister, Environment and Transport; Christchurch, Conservative)
Thank you for those remarks, Mr. Gale. To remind hon. Members, the amendment would have the effect of removing the words ''of the same sex'' from line 5 of the clause, thereby ensuring that the Bill could apply to cohabitees of the same sex and of the opposite sex. I am grateful to the Minister for circulating the letter, which she sent on 29 July to the Chairman of the Joint Committee on Human Rights. As I mentioned during the previous sitting, the Minister's response to the concerns expressed by the Joint Committee on Human Rights is highly material to our deliberations. Several of us are concerned about discrimination that would offend against human rights legislation being introduced by Parliament into the legislation.
The first four questions raised by the Joint Committee concern the Government's justification for limiting the eligibility to form a civil partnership to same-sex couples. The Joint Committee expressed its concern that the exclusion of opposite-sex couples from entitlement to participate in a civil partnership would be inconsistent with the European convention on human rights.
Hon. Members will have read the Minister's response and attempt to argue that the concerns of the Joint Committee are not well founded in law. As this is a highly contentious area that goes to the root of whether the exclusion of opposite-sex partners from civil partnerships is discriminatory and, if so, whether such discrimination can be justified, I would like hon. Members to consider the detail of the Minister's legal case.
In five and a half pages of detailed argument, it is apparent that the Government's position that the Bill as drafted is not discriminatory is based upon a false premise. If the Bill were about establishing homosexual marriage on a par with heterosexual marriage, the arguments put forward by the Government would carry. However, as the Minister has been at pains to explain, the Bill does not create same-sex marriage but only what it describes as civil partnerships.
Turning to the Minister's commentary on the decision of the Canadian court in Miron v. Trudel, she says that the majority in the court emphasised that a distinction may probably be made between
''those who decide to marry and those who do not and that the choice made by the couple in question must be paramount''.
The Minister then refers to the fact that the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has confirmed that it is compatible with convention rights for contracting states to treat married couples differently from couples who do not marry, as is acknowledged in paragraph 23 of the Joint Committee's report. But then she goes on to state:
''Unmarried couples (including opposite-sex couples who could not marry because they could not divorce; opposite-sex couples who chose not to marry when they could have done so; and same-sex couples) have all been held not to be comparable to married couples.''
That is the point. The Minister cites several cases in support of her proposition: Shackell v. UK, Quintana Zapata v. Spain, Saucedo Gomez v. Spain, Mata Estevez v. Spain and Karner v. Austria. Those cases support the proposition that it is perfectly all right under human rights law for marriage to be treated separately from other relationships, but it is not all right that relationships outside marriage should be treated in a discriminatory way. That is what the Bill does: it picks one type of relationship outside marriage—same-sex cohabitation partnership—and gives it an elevated legal status compared with the cohabitation partnership of people who are of the opposite sex in a relationship outside marriage.
The Joint Committee was concerned about that, and that is why I believe that, on the evidence supplied by the Minister and in the light of the legal authorities, the Bill would be discriminatory if enacted according to the Government's wish. There is no proper justification for discriminating in the way that the Government propose in favour of same-sex partnerships over opposite-sex partnerships.
We had a short debate on the sittings motion. Again, it is significant that the Minister did not give any justification as to why she and her colleagues were not prepared to sit between 5 pm and 6.30 pm. If she had brought forward some arguments, they could have
been considered and weighed up, but there were no supporting arguments, just an assertion that ''We're the Government. We're right. We've decided we must finish at 5 o'clock.''
However, the issue of human rights and discrimination is one that I should have thought that the Minister would be much more concerned about than seems, at the moment, to be the case. Unless my amendments are accepted, under this legislation unmarried same-sex couples will be in a privileged position compared with other unmarried couples.
At the time of the 2001 census, there were 78,522 people cohabiting in same-sex relationships. That represented 2 per cent. of all cohabitees and 0.2 per cent. of the population. The same census showed that more than 4 million people were living in cohabiting relationships in England and Wales—or 8 per cent. of the population. So, unless amended, the Bill will potentially give an elevated status to that entire group of 78,000 cohabitees in a same-sex relationship, although we know that only a small proportion of them will take up the option of a partnership. It would discriminate against the 4 million people living in cohabiting relationships for whatever reason.