Today marks the establishment of the House of Lords International Agreements Committee as a freestanding Committee of Parliament. So here is a thread on treaty scrutiny in the House of Lords to celebrate the occasion 1/16/

Parliament has never been very good at scrutinising treaties. Bagehot noted the problem in 1872 in the second edition of his seminal work The English Constitution 2/16
I suspect the reasons for this are twofold: first the fact the negotiations of treaties are the responsibility of the Executive under the royal prerogative... 3/16
And second the UK’s dualist legal system - which means that international agreements do not take effect in domestic law until they have been enacted in domestic legislation. 4/16
This sounds like a safeguard. But in fact agreements tend to be signed before any legislation (if it is necessary) is brought before Parliament. So Parliamentarians are left with a rather binary choice... 5/16
The Ponsonby Rule of 1924 established a convention that treaties would be laid before Parliament 21 days before ratification... 6/16
While the question of treaty scrutiny was considered again during the Governance of Britain review (and the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 put parts of the Ponsonby Rule on a statutory footing), Parliament still has no final say on international agreements... 7/16
Treaty scrutiny commenced in the House of Lords in the 2014-15 legislative session, when the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee began to report on agreements. 8/16
But our story really starts with Brexit. In 2017, the Financial Times reported that post Brexit the UK would need to renegotiate 759 treaties. This was an exaggeration, but it meant that responsibility for scrutiny of Brexit related agreements moved to the Lords EU Committee 9/16
The @LordsEUCom started work in Jan 2019 and by the summer had completed 12 reports covering 42 agreements. In June 2019 it published a report: Treaty scrutiny: lessons learned, seeking to draw some conclusions from this experience. 10/16
In April 2020, following a restructure of the Lords European Union Committee, a new International Agreements Sub-Committee was established to consider *all* international agreements negotiated by HMG... 11/16
This Committee, Chaired by Lord Goldsmith QC, published a report on its proposed working practices in July 2020. These working practices are still current and the report can be read here: https://t.co/sqi9uAVCNy
12/16
The report was debated in the House of Lords on 7 September 2020: https://t.co/RfEXkdPLOU
13/16
On the 28 Jan, following an agreement to further restructure the Lords EU Committee, the @HLIntAgreements was established in its own right. 14/16
Our first evidence session will be on the 1 Feb, looking at why the Government has still not ratified the Istanbul Convention (which seeks to prevent violence against women and girls) despite having signed it in 2012
15/16
Our work is only just starting. Do follow it here @HLIntAgreements and on the UK Parliament website. &, if you are interested in treaty scrutiny, you might also want to follow @hhesterm and @Arabella_Law who have both been a great help over the past few years! Wish us luck! 16/16

More from Society

Brief thread to debunk the repeated claims we hear about transmission not happening 'within school walls', infection in school children being 'a reflection of infection from the community', and 'primary school children less likely to get infected and contribute to transmission'.

I've heard a lot of scientists claim these three - including most recently the chief advisor to the CDC, where the claim that most transmission doesn't happen within the walls of schools. There is strong evidence to rebut this claim. Let's look at


Let's look at the trends of infection in different age groups in England first- as reported by the ONS. Being a random survey of infection in the community, this doesn't suffer from the biases of symptom-based testing, particularly important in children who are often asymptomatic

A few things to note:
1. The infection rates among primary & secondary school children closely follow school openings, closures & levels of attendance. E.g. We see a dip in infections following Oct half-term, followed by a rise after school reopening.


We see steep drops in both primary & secondary school groups after end of term (18th December), but these drops plateau out in primary school children, where attendance has been >20% after re-opening in January (by contrast with 2ndary schools where this is ~5%).

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🌺श्री गरुड़ पुराण - संक्षिप्त वर्णन🌺

हिन्दु धर्म के 18 पुराणों में से एक गरुड़ पुराण का हिन्दु धर्म में बड़ा महत्व है। गरुड़ पुराण में मृत्यु के बाद सद्गती की व्याख्या मिलती है। इस पुराण के अधिष्ठातृ देव भगवान विष्णु हैं, इसलिए ये वैष्णव पुराण है।


गरुड़ पुराण के अनुसार हमारे कर्मों का फल हमें हमारे जीवन-काल में तो मिलता ही है परंतु मृत्यु के बाद भी अच्छे बुरे कार्यों का उनके अनुसार फल मिलता है। इस कारण इस पुराण में निहित ज्ञान को प्राप्त करने के लिए घर के किसी सदस्य की मृत्यु के बाद का समय निर्धारित किया गया है...

..ताकि उस समय हम जीवन-मरण से जुड़े सभी सत्य जान सकें और मृत्यु के कारण बिछडने वाले सदस्य का दुख कम हो सके।
गरुड़ पुराण में विष्णु की भक्ति व अवतारों का विस्तार से उसी प्रकार वर्णन मिलता है जिस प्रकार भगवत पुराण में।आरम्भ में मनु से सृष्टि की उत्पत्ति,ध्रुव चरित्र की कथा मिलती है।


तदुपरांत सुर्य व चंद्र ग्रहों के मंत्र, शिव-पार्वती मंत्र,इन्द्र सम्बंधित मंत्र,सरस्वती मंत्र और नौ शक्तियों के बारे में विस्तार से बताया गया है।
इस पुराण में उन्नीस हज़ार श्लोक बताए जाते हैं और इसे दो भागों में कहा जाता है।
प्रथम भाग में विष्णुभक्ति और पूजा विधियों का उल्लेख है।

मृत्यु के उपरांत गरुड़ पुराण के श्रवण का प्रावधान है ।
पुराण के द्वितीय भाग में 'प्रेतकल्प' का विस्तार से वर्णन और नरकों में जीव के पड़ने का वृत्तांत मिलता है। मरने के बाद मनुष्य की क्या गति होती है, उसका किस प्रकार की योनियों में जन्म होता है, प्रेत योनि से मुक्ति के उपाय...
The entire discussion around Facebook’s disclosures of what happened in 2016 is very frustrating. No exec stopped any investigations, but there were a lot of heated discussions about what to publish and when.


In the spring and summer of 2016, as reported by the Times, activity we traced to GRU was reported to the FBI. This was the standard model of interaction companies used for nation-state attacks against likely US targeted.

In the Spring of 2017, after a deep dive into the Fake News phenomena, the security team wanted to publish an update that covered what we had learned. At this point, we didn’t have any advertising content or the big IRA cluster, but we did know about the GRU model.

This report when through dozens of edits as different equities were represented. I did not have any meetings with Sheryl on the paper, but I can’t speak to whether she was in the loop with my higher-ups.

In the end, the difficult question of attribution was settled by us pointing to the DNI report instead of saying Russia or GRU directly. In my pre-briefs with members of Congress, I made it clear that we believed this action was GRU.