'I do not believe that section 3 of the 1998 Act was intended to have the effect of requiring the courts to give the language of statutes acontextual meanings. That would be playing games with words. The important change in the process of interpretation which was made by section 3 was to deem the Convention to form a significant part of the background against which all statutes, whether passed before or after the 1998 Act came into force, had to be interpreted. Just as the "principle of legality" meant that statutes were construed against the background of human rights subsisting at common law (see R v Home Secretary, Ex p Simms [2000] 2 AC 115), so now, section 3 requires them to be construed against the background of Convention rights. There is a strong presumption, arising from the fundamental nature of Convention rights, that Parliament did not intend a statute to mean something which would be incompatible with those rights. This of course goes far beyond the old-fashioned notion of using background to "resolve ambiguities" in a text which had notionally been read without raising one's eyes to look beyond it. The Convention, like the rest of the admissible background, forms part of the primary materials for the process of interpretation. But, with the addition of the Convention as background, the question is still one of interpretation, i.e. the ascertainment of what, taking into account the presumption created by section 3, Parliament would reasonably be understood to have meant by using the actual language of the statute. It is therefore sometimes possible, as my noble and learned friend Lord Nicholls of Birkenhead pointed out in Ghaidan v Godin-Mendoza [2004] 2 AC 557, paras 26–33, to construe a statutory provision as referring to, or qualified by, some general concept implied rather than expressly mentioned in the language used by Parliament. Thus in the Ghaidan case, the words "as his or her wife or husband" (my emphasis) were interpreted to refer to a relationship of social and sexual intimacy exemplified by, but not limited to, the heterosexual relationship of husband and wife. The deemed background of the Convention enabled the House to adopt this construction in preference to the more restricted construction adopted before the 1998 Act came into force. It may have come as a surprise to the members of the Parliament which in 1988 enacted the statute construed in the Ghaidan case that the relationship to which they were referring could include homosexual relationships. In that sense the construction may have been contrary to the "intention of Parliament". But that is not normally what one means by the intention of Parliament. One means the interpretation which the reasonable reader would give to the statute read against its background, including, now, an assumption that it was not intended to be incompatible with Convention rights.'