Diolch yn fawr, Llywydd. I beg to move the motion standing in the name of Gareth Bennett on the agenda today. I'd like to say right at the start of this debate that I very strongly believe in rehabilitation of prisoners and in prison reform. As a member of the bar for 40 years, I've many times in the past represented as an advocate pro bono prisoners sometimes convicted of very serious offences, in one case a double murder. And, subsequently, when they've been released from prison, I've continued to represent them to obtain justice where I think they've been unfairly treated and have been the victims of injustice. If I thought that there was any substantial rehabilitative value in extending votes to those serving custodial sentences, I would be very much in favour of it, but I'm afraid I don't. 

The change in the law that is in prospect in England, and Scotland and Wales too, arises from a case brought in the European court by a man who is about as unmeritorious as you could possibly imagine—John Hirst, a man who spent an entire lifetime in violent crime and killed a woman with whom he'd been lodging whilst on parole from a two-year burglary sentence with an axe, hitting her seven times, and said that, whilst he'd been lodging with her for a mere 11 days, because she nagged him consistently when he went out, he felt no remorse and bashed her with the axe. He pleaded not guilty to murder but guilty to manslaughter. Amazingly, the then head of the Crown Prosecution Service accepted that on grounds of diminished responsibility. But the judge, sentencing him to 15 years in prison, said:

'I have no doubt you are an arrogant and dangerous person with a severe personality defect.... Unfortunately, this is not suitable for treatment in a mental hospital.'

Whilst in prison, Hirst attacked a prison officer, leading him to be transferred to a high security unit reserved for the most dangerous prisons and he served 25 years due to violent behaviour and other offences whilst in prison, being released in 2004. So, it's not a very good start, I think.

The case went before the European Court of Human Rights and he succeeded ultimately in his claim that the law as it now stands in the United Kingdom was insufficient to protect the human rights of prisoners. Under protocol 1, article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights he succeeded, which merely says that: 

'The High Contracting Parties'— the United Kingdom being one of them—

'undertake to hold free elections at reasonable intervals by secret ballot, under conditions which will ensure the free expression of the opinion of the people in the choice of the legislature.'

So, that's a very broad general principle, as is typical, in fact, of the legal language of the European Convention on Human Rights, giving immense freedom to judges to interpret in the way that they think fit. It is in my view an arrogation of the rights of democratic institutions like the Welsh Assembly or the Parliament of the United Kingdom, and I think it is dangerous for judicial activism of this kind of take place because, once the judges have taken a decision, there is ultimately no appeal, and the people are not able to change the judgments of judges in the European court because you can't do that unless you can change the convention, and that is an extremely difficult thing to do, and anyway the language in which it's cast makes it impossible to do in specific instances, which is why my belief is that we should repatriate the European Convention on Human Rights and legislate for our own Bill of Rights, which democratically elected persons can change in appropriate cases. The European Union's charter of fundamental rights in article 39(2) provides a similar kind of provision, which has also been litigated in the European Court of Justice. All that says is that MEPs

'shall be elected by direct universal suffrage in a free and secret ballot.'

In the Delvigne case of 2015, a similar result to the Hirst case arose out of it. Now, Lord Hoffman, who is no fire-breathing right winger, said of the European Court of Human Rights that it had been

'unable to resist the temptation to aggrandise its jurisdiction and impose uniform rules on member states', and Geoffrey Robertson QC, a paragon of liberalism, said in a pamphlet he wrote called 'Why we need a British Bill of Rights' that the European convention fails, actually,

'to include the rights Parliament won by the "Glorious Revolution" in 1689', and mounting evidence exists that the weasel words of the European convention are damaging other basic rights, and the convention is in some respects out of date.

So, whatever one things about the substantive issue—[Interruption.] Yes, I will.