Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill

Lord Dubs Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 1st December 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dubs (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I am grateful for the way in which the Minister so helpfully explained the Government’s position and made a concession on one of the amendments. Like everyone else, I regret that the debate was split over two days. It gave me the slight advantage that I could read the whole transcript of the first day’s discussion on this amendment, but I am not sure that it has helped me very much in the short contribution I want to make.

We have heard some very impressive contributions indeed to this debate, and I cannot match for a second the enormous legal experience or the experience of our security services, as evidenced by my noble friend Lord Hain, former Secretary of State, and other senior Ministers. All I can do is say that my Amendment 11 stems from the Joint Committee on Human Rights report, which I still believe is a very helpful background to this debate and points the way forward, in ways that are not entirely in line with the speech that the Minister just made.

It seems to me that the nub of the issue in this group of amendments is still whether approval should be prior or after the event, or in real time, as has been said. I cannot help feeling that the argument for prior approval has not been put forward as widely as I would have hoped. We are told that prior approval would prejudice an effective operation. I am really not convinced by that argument—or at least I do not have the experience to understand it fully.

My noble friend Lord Rooker said we are not talking about history. There is a reason some of us mentioned the investigation by the police into the Lawrence family after the racist murder of their son Stephen, and why we are concerned, as my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti said, about the lack of an inquiry into the Finucane case, as announced by the Northern Ireland Secretary yesterday. The reason we cite those two is because they are the two that are in the public domain and that we know about. Other Members of this House have experience of a wider range of cases that, for obvious reasons, they cannot talk about in any detail. I make no apology for saying that, if any one of us in this House had had prior oversight of the investigation into the Lawrence family following the murder of their son, we would all have said, “No, that is unacceptable”. After all, the only point of prior oversight is that it can stop something in its tracks; otherwise, it is no better than after the event. Everybody would have said that that was wrong, and yet it happened.

We all owe a great debt to the security services—they have saved many lives—but now and again, something goes wrong and things are not right. It is because that might happen—very rarely, but it might just happen—that we are concerned about the method of approving this type of activity. That is the argument.

Similarly, with the Pat Finucane case, clearly any of us would have said no. The way that appears to have happened was wrong, and it would not have been allowed. Now we are told that there cannot even be an inquiry into it, for reasons which we will have to look into on another occasion. So I am still worried.

We are dealing with incredibly serious powers: powers to permit criminal activity, which we do not do with any other legislation, as far as I am aware. We are told that this prior approval cannot be given by judges, because judges do not have the insight into human nature that some of the more experienced people would. I do not know very much about judges, although I have had the pleasure of meeting some as colleagues in the House, but I think that, particularly those in criminal law, they have had a great deal of experience of human nature. I would have thought they would be in a good position to make the judgment, as indeed could Secretaries of State, as evidenced by the amendment put forward by my noble friend Lord Hain.

I am not convinced by the arguments against what the human rights committee proposed. I am not convinced that prior approval is not a good idea, whether it is done on the Lord Hain model, the Joint Committee’s model or the Joint Committee’s model as amended by my noble friend Lady Kennedy. All of these are ways of doing it, and I am not convinced that these are not better alternatives than having approval only retrospectively. However, we have had a long debate, and I want to reflect on what has been said before we get to Report. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 11 withdrawn.