Defamation Bill

Debate between Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts and Lord Lester of Herne Hill

Tuesday 5th February 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lester of Herne Hill]

My Lords, I have the misfortune to be opposed to the amendment, and I shall try very briefly to explain why this is so. As I said in Grand Committee, there is across the world a fundamental difference between on the one hand the Chinese and, on the other, the United States. The Chinese position on the world wide web is to create the great firewall of China and the Chinese intranet and to do whatever it can to be able to censor the use of the web by dissidents of one kind or another. The position of the United States, ever since Bill Clinton’s statute, gives an absolute immunity to United States internet service providers. The European compromise is contained in the e-commerce directive, as the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, indicated, and seeks to strike a fair balance between freedom of speech and personal privacy and reputation in the structure of the regulations. Although it is vague, it is fairly balanced.

The world wide web is, on the one hand, of vast benefit not only to website operators but to the public and the citizens of the world in terms of free expression, which it enhances. On the other hand, the web creates much more capacity to damage reputation and personal privacy. That is the other side of the story. The puzzle is, given that this is a transnational, worldwide problem, what can any one country do to try to strike a fair balance? How can we devise a system that will encourage operators such as Google and Yahoo in this respect, given that they have no particular commercial interest in keeping up anything they post which is controversial? For example, if they post criticisms of Ruritania as a corrupt, disgraceful and oppressive Government, and then a threat is made to them to take it down, they have no commercial interest in keeping it up, even though we as citizens have every interest in their doing so. That is the free speech side of the argument.

I perfectly agree that one must do what one can to provide effective remedies in privacy and defamation claims. I admire the boldness of this amendment, which seeks to take out of the Bill altogether subsections (1) to (5) of Clause 5—that is, the entire carefully formulated procedure, including, in subsection (5), the regulations and what they may provide—and to put in place instead a structure which it is suggested will tip the balance better in favour of the claimant. I will not take the time of the House in going through that except to say that the more I read the burdens that the amendment would place on the operator, the more unbalanced I think they are in what they seek to do.

Furthermore, words such as “reasonable care”, with the burden being on the operator, or,

“did not know and had no reason to believe”,

comprise burdensome tests. I fully realise why my noble friends think that that wording is better than what is in the Bill. However, I do not think that it is. I think that it would give rise to litigation and would unduly fetter freedom of expression not for the website operators—I do not mind about them—but for us, the people who receive information and ideas on the web.

I like what the Government have done which I think strikes a perfectly fair balance. It is a good scheme. I am glad that they will introduce regulations. I very much hope that they will not accept this amendment.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts]

My Lords, I have not taken part in debates on the Bill so far, so I shall be brief. However, I want to say a word or two in support of Amendment 10 in the names of my noble friends Lord Phillips and Lord Faulks. I do so on the non-legalistic issue of equality of arms, which I do not believe currently exists on my reading of the Bill and the comments that my noble friends have made. There is an important issue to be addressed here. Rather to my shame, I had not until recently realised that the Bill provided an opportunity to address this growing challenge.

I have raised this issue before at Second Reading of the Protection of Freedoms Bill on 8 November 2011. I said then:

“It is a small issue, but one that is growing in importance. In future, how are we going to ensure the accuracy of information placed on social networking websites and who will be responsible for this? This is a freedom which is increasingly going to need protecting. … A situation can now arise where people and their businesses can be irredeemably damaged by completely inaccurate statements that are put up on these websites and for which they can obtain no redress. … People are entitled to some clear way of challenging these statements and, where appropriate, of obtaining redress. I would be interested to hear whether my noble friend”—

that was the noble Lord, Lord Henley—

“has any policy developments under consideration to deal with this issue, one that is surely going to increase in importance in the future”.—[Official Report, 8/11/11; cols. 187-88.]

I am afraid that answer came there none. Therefore, I am glad that my noble friends have taken up the cudgels to try to achieve a better equality of arms, as I said.

My noble friend Lord Faulks referred to the power of website operators. I have seen the power of website operators in interviewing talented young people; I can think of one or two who had disobliging statements posted about them which have had a very deleterious effect on their career. The website operators—this is perhaps more the case now than it used to be—have not been too quick to try to remove this information and cleanse the websites.

As I was preparing my speech on the aforementioned Second Reading debate, a case arose of a Portsmouth plumber whose business had been completely wrecked because he was accused of being a paedophile. It turned out that the statement had been posted by a competitor firm. Holiday companies and hotels have been damaged in the same way. However, I have to admit that on certain occasions people have written bullish accounts of their own hotel in an attempt to increase trade.

It was in connection with this last category that I mentioned in my Second Reading speech the role of the website TripAdvisor. A short 24 hours passed before it asked for a meeting. Its approach in discussions with me showed the challenges the Government face—challenges which I think they have not so far tackled but which my noble friends’ amendment does.

First, the TripAdvisor representatives argued that there was no problem and that their customer surveys showed a high level of customer satisfaction. Secondly, when pressed about the response to those who were unhappy, even if they were a small minority, it seemed that for every solution there was a problem: a problem of jurisdiction, given the international nature of website operators, as my noble friend Lord Lester said; a problem of identification—who posts what about whom; a problem of competitive disadvantage as a result of a checking system which could be portrayed as intrusive; and, finally, when all else failed, a problem of data protection, the reasons for this being slightly less clear to me. I said to the representatives that in my view there was an issue of increasing public concern and that the industry—if that is the right collective noun for website operators—needed to agree to establish, publicise and enforce a code of practice which had a suitable element of representation of the public interest in any disciplinary procedures.

So, in enthusiastically supporting this entire amendment, I particularly support its provision in subsection (2) regarding the value to be placed on the defence of having an anti-defamation code of practice.

Justice and Security Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts and Lord Lester of Herne Hill

Wednesday 11th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts]

My Lords, I shall also speak to Amendments 44, 46, 48 and 49. They say that you should never begin your remarks with an apology, but I apologise because I had understood that there would be a mini-debate and the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, and I were in the second half. He de-grouped so I am something of a tail-end Charlie.

I will cover some of the ground that we discussed earlier—in particular, the use of PII before a CMP application—but with some differences, which I shall come to later. I do not expect my noble and learned friend on the Front Bench to give a long and considered answer, because he gave one before the dinner break, but I hope that he will be able to take on board some of the points that I shall make in the next few minutes.

As this is the first group of amendments that I have proposed, I should declare interests. I am a trustee of Fair Trials International and treasurer of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition. However, as I said at Second Reading, I am not a lawyer and I have never been involved in the security services. I said then that I ventured out on to the ice with some trepidation and, watching the legal thunderbolts that flew across the Chamber earlier this evening, my trepidation has not reduced. However, I was encouraged by another contributor to our Second Reading debate who said that this was too important a matter to be left to the lawyers, so I am venturing a bit further on to the ice.

All these amendments are probing and I hope to tease out the Government’s thinking on a number of issues. To guard against the more obvious ways of making a fool of myself in your Lordships’ Chamber, I have enlisted the help of Tony Peto of Blackstone Chambers and of the campaigning group Reprieve, to whom I am extremely grateful. All the amendments that I have tabled, and more that we shall discuss later and no doubt at our next sitting, have a common theme and background about which I feel strongly. I hope that the Committee will forgive me if on this first set of amendments I explain the background in a little more detail—I will not have to do it again—and, if this appears slightly unlawyerly, I apologise.

I said at Second Reading that I recognised that there was an important issue here, and before the dinner break the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, said that there were going to be a number of cases where national security was inherently and implicitly involved in the case. At the nexus of civil liberties and national security lies the fact that not everybody can know everything and there are legitimate reasons for having to keep some things secret. However, to keep matters secret is undesirable, so I believe that there has to be a strict test of justification. My amendments, all of which are probing at this stage, are designed to develop the Government’s thinking about this justification and, in doing so, to have a chance to benefit from the legal expertise in your Lordships’ House.

My concerns about the Bill can be grouped under two headings. Both concern fairness and are what I have described before as regulatory capture and the possible impact of these proposals on our society. I have said before that I am always concerned about the naturally inherent risk of the adverse nature of regulators, and the security services are one such example. In all fields, whether it be national security, social services or financial services, regulators are judged by failure or at least by the absence of failure. Therefore, regulators tend to want to set the bar as high as possible to give themselves the maximum amount of power or points of leverage to deliver their allotted task.

That, of course, is the entirely positive aspect of the regulatory case, but I am afraid that there can be a less attractive aspect, which is that of spreading a blanket of confidentiality over a matter so as to avoid issues of incompetence or embarrassment being revealed, or the revelation of a smoking gun. I am hoping to find out during our Committee proceedings how we can lean into the wind, so to speak, and make sure that the procedures that we set up really do enable the sorting of the wheat from the chaff in these difficult and critical areas.

My second area of concern is about the impact on our society of these measures, and this underlines the critical importance of our discussions. This is not about legal technicalities but real life. I take part in the Lord Speaker’s outreach programme. It is a fascinating experience which I thoroughly enjoy. I never go to one of these meetings without learning something about our society and the way in which your Lordships’ House and Parliament are viewed. Most of my visits are to schools, to young men and women of 17 or 18 years of age, doing A-levels. I am a West Midlander, so my visits take me to schools in Birmingham and the Black Country, where there is a large black minority ethnic, particularly Muslim, population. I emphasise, as background to our discussion on the Bill, that these young men and women are keenly interested in our judicial system and its application to them and their communities. When you see them, you get questions—I welcome the questions, because I get such a lot from them—about Guantanamo Bay, Binyam Mohamed, and all these aspects which are the background to what we are discussing during the passage of the Bill.

My second reason for tabling my amendments is therefore to ensure that we do not strain the fabric of our society too much and so, indeed, to ensure that when I begin my visits again to the schools in the autumn, I can look these young men and women in the eye, and say, “Yes, we did look at these issues; yes, we did explore the ramifications; yes, we did have legal expertise bearing down on it; yes, we did make the Government justify their policies; and no, this is emphatically not a system with any in-built bias”.

So, with that rather long-winded explanation of the amendments that I have tabled, to horse! Amendment 43 is a trigger for the operation of Clause 6(1), the application for a CMP. During the earlier debate, I was interested in the balance of advantage for PII and CMPs. Amendment 44 sets out the conditions to be fulfilled before the trigger can be pulled. Four of these are listed: that the court has gone through a PII process; that the process has resulted in excluded material; that material includes evidence damaging to national security; and that, as a consequence, the court is prepared to consider an application for a closed material proceeding.

Amendment 46 sets three tests for the court to consider before making a deliberation: that the threshold conditions have been met; that only a CMP can provide a just resolution and PII will not work; and, lastly and perhaps most importantly, that,

“there is no serious risk of injustice to either party”.

I have been advised—I say that with care—that the earlier amendments that we looked at did not cover that in quite the same way. Indeed, with this, you increase the amount of judicial discretion and therefore improve the application of justice and reduce the ability of the Government to dominate the proceedings.

Amendment 48 inserts a new set of tests for the court to consider in deciding to allow an application. There are five of them, which are self-explanatory, but I draw attention to the last one, on which I am again told that in the interests of open justice and natural justice the statement of whether it would be in the interests of justice to grant the application is again likely to increase judicial discretion.

Finally, Amendment 49 requires the Secretary of State or another party to go through the PII process before applying for a CMP, as opposed to considering whether to make such an application for a CMP outright. The purpose behind these amendments overall is to increase the amount of judicial discretion, and to do so to a greater extent than the alternatives that have been put before us tonight. I beg to move.

[Lord Lester of Herne Hill]

My Lords, in a sense, we have been through this before. This is another means of tackling the problem. I entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, in raising issues of public confidence. It is a matter of great concern to me that what we call civil society—often very uncivil civil society—has reacted to the Green Paper and the Government’s proposals in extreme terms, it even having been suggested that we should deny the Bill a Second Reading. There is a great deal of cynicism and suspicion about the work done by our security and intelligence agencies. The fact that the press feel aggrieved that the principle of open justice is necessarily limited by the Bill that we are now considering again leads to the impression that something perfectly unconstitutional and disgraceful is being put forward.

I have never taken that view and have agreed with the Bingham institute and Tom Hickman in particular in the way in which they have approached the problem. However, the Government have not done themselves any service by the way in which they produced a Green Paper and put forward far too broad terms, which gave rise immediately to a justifiable negative reaction, and they are now rightly narrowing what they originally sought to do. We have to be careful to realise as we sit in this Chamber at this hour that what we are now doing will probably not enhance confidence outside but, rather, do the opposite, much as we regret it. We must do what we can to combat cynicism and lack of confidence in the work done by the security and intelligence agencies.

I sometimes worry that, unless we give our judges appropriate powers and discretion, we will in the long run also undermine public confidence in the judiciary. It will be most undesirable if the judges are seen merely to be rubber stamps. I just want to give one example. The only time I took part in closed evidence material proceedings was when I represented the People’s Mujahideen of Iran, which had been proscribed by Jack Straw and was seeking to have the proscription removed. It was prevented from collecting funds, having meetings or publishing material. I turned up as its advocate. There was a special advocate but the special advocate was unable to be of any use at all because what we needed to know was the gist of the case against the People’s Mujahideen of Iran.

After two days, my clients came to me and said that this was a completely unfair procedure, that they did not have the faintest idea of the gist of what they were supposed to have done and that they were now going to withdraw from the proceedings and withdraw my instructions. I perfectly understood their view. Later, they chose another counsel, David Vaughan QC, who went to Luxembourg. The Court of Justice in Luxembourg eventually found in their favour, as a result of which I think that the organisation is no longer proscribed.

I say all that because, having lived through that experience, I understand perfectly why the closed material procedure causes such anxiety to the press, to members of the public who take an interest, to those who go through the procedure and to the special advocates. It is no use saying that special advocates underrate their own capacity. They have to live with this procedure and do the best they can, and I perfectly understand why they have these reservations.