Justice and Security Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale and Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood

Tuesday 26th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale]

My Lords, I will address Amendments 6A and 6B and the consequential Amendments 16A, 16B and 16C. I will not repeat all the arguments made by the Minister, but I agree with them. Like the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick, I cannot accept Amendment 6A or Amendment 6B. As a non-lawyer, when I read Amendment 6A I interpreted it exactly as the Minister feared the court would be forced to interpret it: that it would have to try every other possible method before it came to the CMP.

I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald of River Glaven, will forgive me for saying that when I read Amendment 6B I wondered if he meant it to be a wrecking amendment. When I heard him explain it he seemed to confirm that suspicion. He is arguing against the whole concept of CMP. Why are we here? We are not here because we want to go into this kind of judicial arrangement but because we have got a big problem on our hands. The previous Government had it and this Government have now got it. People are going into the civil courts and suing officers of the intelligence and security services, accusing them—rightly or wrongly—of doing terrible things such as being implicitly involved in torture and extradition. The services cannot defend themselves because they cannot put material into a court.

There has to be a solution and the solution is not PII, as some people seem to think. I would also like to quote the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf—if he will forgive me because he is in his place—not from the excellent letter quoted by the Minister, but from what he said in a debate on this issue in this House on 11 July last year. He said:

“I should also make it clear that I think that the noble Lord, Lord Carlile”—

who had just spoken ahead of him—

“is right in saying that in most situations that are covered by the Bill the result will be preferable to both sides”—

both sides—

“if the closed hearing procedure is adopted rather than PII, because PII has the very unfortunate effect that you cannot rely on the material that is in issue, whereas both the claimant and the Government may want to rely on that material. That is a good reason for having the closed-hearing procedure”.—[Official Report, 11/07/12; col. 1189]

I very much agree with that.

The amendments that I have mentioned do not improve the Bill in any way. In fact, they are to the detriment of the Bill. This is a problem which the previous Government had to wrestle with, the present Government are having to wrestle with and the House has to wrestle with it. Now that they have included the latest Commons amendment, the Government have made a very good attempt at trying to square what we all want, which is a fair trial. That must include, in the civil court, members of the security and intelligence services so they can bring a defence to accusations against them.

[Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood]

My Lords, in rising to support this Bill I confess to a particular interest in the legislation. Many years ago—although not quite as long ago as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf—as Treasury Counsel I was required to advise and act for the Government in national security, public interest immunity cases. For six years after the passage of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, I was the Intelligence Services Commissioner responsible for retrospective judicial oversight over the various intelligence agencies. For considerably more years than that, I have been involved, as a member of the court, in most of the national security cases that came before us, including the control order cases and the expulsion cases like that which sought to return Abu Qatada to Jordan, on which the litigation still continues. The Al Rawi case relating to Guantanamo Bay, although it was settled before it came to us, came on the issue of principle which was whether, as a matter of common law, the courts could order a closed material procedure. The majority of us held not. We held that only Parliament could sanction so fundamental a departure from the principle of open justice. Hence Clause 6 is now before us.