Diolch, Dirprwy Lywydd. I'm very pleased and grateful to you for allowing me to make a brief contribution to this debate today. As others have already said, this is undoubtedly a time when human rights are under threat. Goodness only knows what will become of the shambles that is the Brexit process, and how that will affect our rights and our ability in Wales to access those European protections. But what we do know, Dirprwy Lywydd, is that the whole debate around Brexit has allowed some individuals to feel that they have the right to express some particularly poisonous attitudes, and the dreadful spike in hate crime that we saw here in Wales immediately after that vote is testimony to that. And we know that there are elements in the UK press that have undermined the concept of human rights, that have made it seem something that is irrelevant, that is precious, that, as Julie Morgan has said, is something that isn't relevant to our everyday lives. And in the cross-party group, which I'll refer to again, it was very heartening to hear our speaker talk about human rights not being a matter about the left and the right of politics, as it's too often sometimes portrayed in elements of the British press. It is about basic rights that should be accessible to us all. 

I was very pleased—and I am grateful to Julie Morgan for mentioning it—to be invited in this context to help re-establish the cross-party group on human rights in this place. I was asked to do so by Associate Professor Simon Hoffman of the Hillary Rodham Clinton School of Law at Swansea University, an expert in the field who I know is known to many in this Chamber. Simon convenes the Wales human rights stakeholder group, a group of over 20 organisations, coming at the issue from various perspectives, and bringing a great potential wealth of expertise that I think that we can use. I was very grateful to Julie for being there on Monday, and I'm also grateful to Jayne Bryant and to Darren Millar, who have joined the group, and I hope that other Members will feel able to do so as our work progresses. As Julie Morgan has said, we met this Monday, here in this place, on international Human Rights Day. And we agreed to work together towards new, made-in-Wales comprehensive human rights legislation, incorporating the appropriate UN conventions into Welsh law.

I've been very grateful, as the leader of the house has mentioned, for the very positive way in which she responded to my proposal to incorporate the disability convention. And I'm sure that she will be having similar discussions with Darren Millar around his legislative proposal on the rights of older persons. And I was very interested to read the Counsel General's remarks, to which the leader of the house has referred today. And I'm very grateful for the whole spirit in which the leader of the house has addressed this issue in the months since I've returned here, and I very much hope—and I'm sure from what she said today—that, regardless of any changes in particular individuals' roles, the Welsh Government will continue to take this positive and extremely unpartisan approach. The cross-party group looks forward to working with the Welsh Government as this agenda is moved forward here in Wales, supporting, and challenging, where that's appropriate. And that group, as I've already said, provides an excellent reservoir of expertise, which I'm sure the Ministers in charge will want to avail themselves of.

Deputy Presiding Officer, I hope that Brexit can be reversed, and I hope that the human rights protections afforded to us by being part of the European Union, and the access that that provides to European courts, can be retained. But whether or not that is achieved, I trust that we can work together to ensure that the vital international conventions are enshrined meaningfully into Welsh law. Diolch yn fawr iawn i chi.