Chamber and committees

There is a great deal that we can still do in this area. I reiterate that we are absolutely committed to the incorporation of UN treaties into Scots law, and that we are absolutely committed to delivering the human rights bill. Therefore, we need to keep up the momentum on the delivery of what we can do in the meantime. There are areas of the bill in relation to which we can still test and refine proposals.

We are very conscious of the fact that it would help if civic society could see how far things have developed. We are not asking civic society to go through the consultation that it has already gone through or to repeat the process that it has been through. I fully appreciate that people have fought for many years for what was going to be in the bill and that they are tired. They have spent a lot of their time and capacity on that, and they do not want to waste time.

Therefore, I am very conscious that we need to move forward with specific proposals that we can implement in the next 18 months. Key to that is our relationship with the UK Government and how we can demonstrate that. Those are the areas that I am keen to work on. We need to use the next 18 months to demonstrate that, together, we have made progress and that we can use those 18 months to make further progress. I hope that, for the first time, a conversation can take place between the Scottish Government, the UK Government and stakeholders about how things can develop.

Professor McHarg’s work in this area is exceptionally important, and I point to some of the difficulties that she raised in her remarks. Her work is absolutely being taken into account, and it is one of the areas that will help form the basis of the event that I have mentioned, at which we are keen to ensure that we work with stakeholders to discuss the limitations that the Supreme Court judgment places on the scope and on how that work can be taken forward.

That work has been examined. Other alternatives, proposals and solutions might come forward, but we need to have that discussion at pace so that we can work with the UK Government on a solution that both Governments are keen to take forward.

I have listened with great interest to the proposals and suggestions on that, and I completely appreciate why they were made. This Government is determined to carry on its work with the human rights bill, and we are keen to work closely with civic society and public bodies on that.

We need to look at refreshing the governance arrangements, as those were set up with the intention of introducing a bill. The bill is not being introduced to the same timeframe; we also want to strengthen it further. Therefore, we need to look at the issues of specific interest that we want to work on and at how we can have a governance structure that enables an eye to be kept on what can be done in the next 18 month and is not just about what is in the bill.

I encourage everyone who is interested and remains, as I am, fundamentally committed to delivering the human rights bill to carry on that discussion with the Government. I feel that frustration, and I have heard about it directly. We can still do a great deal to move things forward in the next 18 months, and I am absolutely committed to leading that work on behalf of the Government.

Thank you, convener, and good morning. I am very grateful to the committee for inviting me along today. The committee will have noted my letter last month on the next steps for the human rights bill, and I will cover some of that ground in my opening statement.

Last month’s programme for government set out our commitments to strengthen the implementation of human rights and to advancing proposals around extended rights protection. It restated the Government’s commitment to legislation that will incorporate international treaties into Scots law, developing proposals and engaging with stakeholders.

I reiterate at the outset that the Scottish Government remains absolutely committed to the deliverance of human rights and to bringing forward the human rights bill. As the committee knows, it was our intention to bring forward that bill during the current session. However, we have decided instead to continue working on the bill over a longer timeframe and to introduce it in the next parliamentary session, subject to the outcome of the 2026 election.

I will briefly explain the rationale underpinning that decision, but first I acknowledge the deep frustration, concern and, indeed, anger that have been expressed by civil society and others who have worked to shape the bill to date. The decision to postpone introduction and continue the development of the bill was not one that I took lightly. It is the Government’s view that, given the significance and complexity of the bill, there is more that can and should be done now to test and refine proposals further to ensure that the bill delivers the improved human rights outcomes that we all want it to achieve.

In particular, it has become increasingly clear to me that the constraints in the devolution settlement that were highlighted by the United Kingdom Supreme Court judgment on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (Incorporation) (Scotland) Bill present a significant challenge to our ambitions for the human rights bill and, as a consequence, our ability to make law that extends protections for human rights as far as we want it to.

The judgment exposes the limits of the settlement as it currently stands, and how far we can go in practice to advance rights through treaty incorporation. Proceeding now would mean a bill with duties on public bodies of significantly reduced scope, complexity for duty bearers and rights holders and, therefore, challenges in making those rights real on the ground.

Up to this point, we have had to—to an extent—accept that challenge as an outcome of the Supreme Court judgment that we had to live with. However, things changed over the summer. The general election has presented, for the first time in 14 years, an opportunity to engage constructively with a UK Government—a Government that appears much more willing to address issues together, including how devolution is working in practice. My ministerial colleagues welcome that constructive and collaborative tone in the early discussions that we have had on a range of matters, and I hope that that will continue to be the case.

We are determined to make progress on addressing issues relating to the proposed human rights bill. Following publication of the programme for government, I wrote to UK Government ministers seeking to establish early dialogue. Officials have been tasked with convening an event before the end of the year to bring together key stakeholders to look at the challenges with rights incorporation and devolution following the UNCRC incorporation bill judgment.

We also want to use this next period to further consider our proposals on the incorporation of treaties concerning women, disabled people and people who experience racism. Stakeholders have pressed us to go further, and that needs careful consideration.

In the period ahead, I am seeking to take early action to advance rights now and to prepare the public sector for new domestic human rights duties in the future. That includes building the public sector’s capacity and capability to embed a human rights-based approach in everything that we do, as well as considering the development of an accessible tracker tool to support the implementation of international treaty body recommendations. I am happy to go into more detail on that, should the committee wish me to.

Even though stakeholders are deeply frustrated—I know that the committee heard that frustration directly last week—I very much hope that they will stay the course and work with us on that path. We are determined to make progress, and we must work together to allow that to happen. I look forward to the discussion today.

I appreciate the basis for that challenge. The whole purpose of the Scottish Government bringing forward proposals for a human rights bill is that we believed—and we still believe—that the best way to protect those rights is for them to be enshrined in Scots law. However, I go back to the point that the bill that we could have introduced at this point was not strong enough to be able to deliver on the hopes and expectations of civic Scotland on the matter.

We have seen the limitations of what could be achieved with the UNCRC incorporation bill after a reconsideration stage. That is not a position that I wanted to be in with delivering the human rights bill. We have an opportunity to do something stronger and wider, and to look at things in a way that we did not have the opportunity to do when the UNCRC incorporation bill was going through. That is an opportunity that I believe cannot be missed. That cannot be done at the same time as delivering the most complex bill through the Scottish Parliament.

I put on record my appreciation and admiration for Professor Miller’s work in that area. He is, once again, leading us all in demonstrating how work in the area can be progressed. Even with the bill being taken forward on a longer timescale than we had initially proposed, we must continue to take steps to further embed human rights culture across public services, and the charter of rights that Elena Whitham highlighted is a tangible example of that. Many of the rights in the charter are already in law, but people are not aware of them. The charter is a tool by which to raise awareness of those rights and empower people to claim them.

We have already seen some examples of where the charter is being adopted and embedded, which I think is important. Professor Miller’s work highlights one of the areas in which we are, across Government, still determined to take forward human rights in a practical and demonstrable way until the bill is ready for delivery early in the next session of Parliament.

For a start, we have not abandoned the bill. In fact, I hope that it is one of the areas where a Labour UK Government and the Scottish Government can work together. Therefore, talk about abandoning the bill is not helpful for that relationship—if I can put it like that. I am genuinely reaching out to work with Labour colleagues in the UK Government on the issue.

Clearly, there was going to be an election. With the greatest respect, Mr O’Kane might think that he knew, all those years ago, what the result was going to be, but we had to allow the process to happen. We also had to test the tone and whether what had been discussed beforehand about a reset was actually going to happen.

We are still in the early days of the new UK Government, but we have very much seen a change of tone—the dialogue is in a completely different space. However, we now need to get past that and work out the genuine practicalities of how to deal with the Supreme Court judgment.

The Scottish Government cannot just come up with a solution. Actually, I will rephrase that—we could have gone to the UK Government with a list of demands right at the very start of its days, but that would not have been the reset that the First Minister has tasked his cabinet secretaries with making. I am keen to sit down with the UK Government and together work out solutions that allow us to get past and deal with the Supreme Court judgment, if the UK Government wishes to do so. However, we cannot do that unilaterally.

I want to have that discussion in a completely different way from how we had it when we previously had the opportunity. With the greatest of respect, that is why it could not have been done until the new UK Government ministers were in place.

I am happy to bring in my officials if they wish to speak, but I will give an example that I hope will help. Again, I appreciate that others have been using these particular words, but I am keen to make it clear that that has not been the case.

Throughout my discussions with stakeholders, I have said to them that I am exceptionally uncomfortable about the bill not delivering what they want. All the way, I made it very clear to them that, with the Supreme Court judgment, the limitations of the settlement left me such that I could not deliver what they asked of me and what I wanted to deliver. I raised my concerns in those discussions.

We have begun those discussions with the UK Government. Indeed, Angus Robertson had a very useful meeting about resetting relations. That was certainly useful from our perspective, and I hope that the Secretary of State for Scotland felt that it was useful, too.

I have also written to my counterparts about our desire for a reset and for us to work together. I have not had a reply to that yet, but I do not mean that as a criticism, because we are asking for something that is quite fundamental and exceptionally complex. Therefore, I hope to be able to take up those discussions at ministerial level later this year.

As members would expect, discussions at official level are a foundation that is already well in place, and there will be further discussions about this issue in the next few weeks with senior officials at UK Government level. Again, that process has begun. I appreciate that this is a new UK Government and that it has a lot in its inbox, but in respect of what we are asking of the UK Government in this particular area, I would say that, although the tone and some of the practicalities have changed—for example, I shared a platform at an anti-poverty event with the Secretary of State for Scotland yesterday, something that I could not have imagined happening previously—we still need to get past that initial, and really welcome, level of engagement to address those practicalities. It is a big ask for the UK Government, and we are keen to work with that Government collaboratively and constructively on how we can take that forward.

I think you meant to say that the Scottish Parliament is not one of the most powerful devolved institutions in the world, as demonstrated by the Supreme Court decision. I think that what has not lived up to stakeholders’ expectations is the devolution settlement.