The bill speaks to human rights on several levels. It is useful to consider the human rights issues in three groupings. The policy memorandum is useful in setting out the human rights issues and presents a balanced reflection of the interests. It makes interesting statements about the move towards land as a national asset, which is a human rights-based approach that is promoted by the Scottish Human Rights Commission and by United Nations agencies around the world and is well established as the appropriate method to address land.
Paragraph 35 of the policy memorandum states:
“Scotland’s desire is to lead by example to address its complex and often emotive history. In this, the Scottish Government’s desire is to move from a reactive place of addressing historic issues to a proactive position where governance of land is consistent with the aspirations and outcomes desired in Scotland.”
At that point, the policy memorandum is saying that we want to proactively use land and proactively address rights—a far healthier position, perhaps, than the present situation, in which rights are not respected. In the present situation, we can look at three groupings of rights. We have the landowners’ rights, which we know about; we have the tenants’ rights; and we have the rights of the wider public. We have not heard so much about the wider public’s rights or about tenants’ rights.
I will start with the wider public’s rights, on the basis that that group includes the rights of the most vulnerable and the largest number. What rights does the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill address? It addresses article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, on the right to an adequate standard of life, including the right to food, water, housing and development. Under article 2.1, states are under a duty to take steps to use their resources to apply those rights to their maximum availability and under general comment 12, socially impoverished groups should be given extra support.
Article 11 sets out the right to an adequate standard of living for the wider public, particularly for impoverished groups, and from that we can draw the right to adequate housing, which is in article 11 of the covenant and also in article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the international level, supported by general comments 4, 7 and 16 on the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. We can go into detail about that if members so wish.
However, the right to adequate housing does not exist only at the international level; there is also evidence for it at the European level. Although it is not enshrined specifically in the European convention on human rights, it is enshrined in the European Social Charter, as revised, at article 31, and the ECHR implicitly includes the right to housing, because many of the ECHR rights—such as the right to vote and the right to education—rely on housing. Obstacles to housing therefore create obstacles to rights and affect the state’s positive obligation to protect those rights.
There might be someone else who wants to come in at that point.