Iraq Inquiry

Debate between Jack Straw and Jeremy Corbyn

Thursday 29th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Straw]

I am afraid that the answer to that is well above my pay grade. My hon. Friend would have to ask the inquiry, or those responsible for the inquiry, about that. But I just say, parenthetically, that when this is all over, there will be many issues for parties on both sides of the House to consider about the conduct of such inquiries, not least whether they would be aided, as I soundly believe they would be, if counsel and high-grade legal teams were available to them.

There has been much nonsense around suggesting that it has been witnesses who have caused the extensive delays in the inquiry’s progress, and therefore its final report. I am grateful to the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden for what he said, because these claims are wholly without foundation. A moment’s thought should convince anyone that no witness has had any interest in the inquiry’s being dragged out for this long. For example, to prepare for my evidence sessions in 2010 and 2011, I had to study hundreds of records. If the Maxwellisation process had taken place at the time, the detail from those records would still have been fresh in my mind. As it is, a further four years has elapsed, requiring fresh study of reams of documents. I am conscious too, as the whole House will be, of the anxiety and concern of those who have lost loved ones in the conflict at the delays in publishing the report.

When Sir John wrote to the Prime Minister last week with an update on the progress of his inquiry, he said that he could confirm that,

“individuals are currently being given the opportunity to respond to provisional criticism in the inquiry’s draft report”.

The House should note the use of the adverb “currently”, to which the adverb “recently” might have been an informative addition. It follows from this that no witness to the inquiry has remotely been responsible for any of the delays that have occurred to date. Nor, as Mr Blair has made clear in a recent statement, has he or any other witness been involved in delaying the process of declassifying previously sensitive documents.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

Is there not then a question as to any obstruction that might have come from the office of George Bush, the former President of the United States, or the current White House, which seem to be very reluctant to reveal the details of correspondence and communication between former Prime Minister Blair and former President Bush?

[Mr Straw]

I have no information about any of the process of declassification.

At the same time, my hope is that in the Maxwellisation process, which is only “currently” under way, no one is suggesting that any person who is the subject of provisional criticisms by the inquiry should not be given a proper opportunity to consider those and to respond, with sufficient time, proportionate to the volume and complexity of the material involved. It has, after all, taken the inquiry more than five years finally to produce its initial report, and as the Prime Minister has conceded, even that may not be complete.

Let me deal briefly with the claims that if the last Government had established an inquiry earlier, we would have had the report by now. There are two responses to that. The first, the obvious one, is that no one anticipated delays of the length that we have seen. The then Leader of the Opposition’s complaint, when the announcement was made in June 2009, was that the inquiry

“is due to take—surprise, surprise—until July or August 2010.”—[Official Report, 15 June 2009; Vol. 494, c. 25.]

That is after that general election. There was never the remotest suggestion from anyone, nor anticipation, that this report would not be out well before the 2015 general election.

Secondly, although they were the subject of controversy, the previous Government did have sound reasons for not establishing an inquiry earlier than we did, because British troops were heavily involved in combat operations at the time when earlier calls were made. Our rationale—

Justice and Security Bill [Lords]

Debate between Jack Straw and Jeremy Corbyn

Monday 4th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Straw]

Of course I do, and that was going to be my next point. No one is suggesting that SIAC deals with trivial matters. It deals with whether an individual should be deported on national security grounds, while the control order tribunals deal with restrictions of individuals’ liberty.

I have met one individual who was subject to a control order and will tell the hon. Member for Bedford (Richard Fuller) about the circumstances outside the Chamber. The heart of the issue is about protecting our national security. That has been discussed in abstract terms today, but what we are actually debating is how to protect the sources of information on which intelligence depends. These individuals are developed by our intelligence and security agencies and they place themselves at considerable risk. In essence, they provide information to the United Kingdom—as they would to a foreign intelligence agency—that they are not supposed to provide. Sometimes they betray their own Government or country. They are, by definition, giving away confidences and they do so for a variety of motives: some say that they are doing it for the highest of motives, which are that they fundamentally disagree with the system in which they are operating; some do it for the lowest of motives, because they have committed a criminal act and want some form of escape; and some are somewhere in between, in that they have high motives but they also want some money.

In every case, that information would simply dry up if the identity of that individual, or information leading to their identification, was compromised. That is the fundamental dilemma, and there is no way out of it unless we want to abandon our intelligence and security agencies. Let us remind ourselves—this is not scare- mongering; it happens to be true—that, had we abandoned those agencies, scores of serious atrocities would have killed our constituents and many others. If we had explained how we had ended up in such a situation by saying that information had to be provided in its entirety in open court in all circumstances, people would have said, “Thanks very much, but my relative, wife or child has just died.” That is the dilemma and it is not abstract—it is absolutely real.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Straw]

I hope that my hon. Friend will allow me to make progress, because I have already used up a lot of time.

This leads me back—I will finish shortly—to the reason why, with great regret, I cannot support the endeavours of my hon. Friends on the Front Bench to set a relative test that

“the degree of harm to the interests of national security if the material is disclosed would be likely to outweigh the public interest in the fair and open administration of justice.”

That could lead, inadvertently and unintentionally, to a situation in which a judge might decide that the identity of an agent or other crucial information about the work of our intelligence agencies needed to be disclosed in the interests of open justice. We have to accept that the justice under discussion is, by definition, not open. It cannot be—we cannot have it both ways. There is no dubiety about that. I understand why the test has been proposed, but it does not work.

Finally, many Members have reputations as liberals, including the Minister without Portfolio, the hon. Member for Chichester and many on the Liberal Benches. I have never sought that reputation, and nor has it been offered to me, but Lord Woolf, the former Lord Chief Justice, is someone of impeccable liberal credentials—he even lives in Barnes. He wrote in a letter to The Times that the Bill as drafted

“now ensures that we will retain our standards of general justice, while also putting an end to the blindfolding of judges in this small number of cases.”

To be frank, if it is good enough for the liberal Lord Woolf, it ought to be good enough for this House.

Justice and Security Bill [Lords]

Debate between Jack Straw and Jeremy Corbyn

Tuesday 18th December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jack Straw (Blackburn) (Lab)]

Before I come to the merits of the Bill, I would like to draw the House’s attention to the fact that, along with Her Majesty’s Government, I have been a defendant in civil actions brought by two Libyan nationals and their families—Mr al-Saadi, who has already been mentioned, and Mr Belhaj. A settlement was made public last week in respect of Mr al-Saadi’s case without any admission of liability by any of the defendants. In the case of Mr Belhaj, proceedings are still active. In these circumstances, the House will, I am sure, understand how constrained I must be in respect of these matters at the present time. I hope to be able to say much more about these cases at an appropriate stage in the future. I should, however, make it clear that at all times, in all the positions of Secretary of State that I occupied, I was scrupulous in seeking to carry out my duties in accordance with the law.

On a lighter note, I apologise Mr Deputy Speaker, to you and to the House that I may have to leave if the winding-up speeches go past 6.15 pm, as I have to conduct an open air carol service beyond the House at 7 pm.

Let me move on to discuss the Bill. As Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary, I was responsible over a period of nine years for all three of the agencies—a distinction, I gather, I share only with the noble Lord Hurd in the other place. During those nine years, I came to have a very high regard indeed for the agencies, for their leadership and for all the staff who work for them. I also recognised that it is through improved methods and means of accountability that the quality and standing of those agencies can be improved and not undermined. I therefore greatly welcome the proposals in part 1 to strengthen the role and status of the Intelligence and Security Committee, and, indeed, to add to the powers of the Intelligence Services Commissioner.

The more controversial aspects of the Bill—on closed material proceedings—are contained in part 2. The starting-point for everyone in this House has to be that, in principle, justice must be open and has to be seen to be done. This House and our courts have rightly established a high bar for any modification of that principle. Sometimes, however, they have so modified that principle where it collides with other equally important principles. One of those concerns the safety of witnesses in criminal trials. Thus, in the Criminal Evidence (Witness Anonymity) Act 2008, following the Law Lords’ decision in the Davis case, I introduced—and both Houses quickly passed—a statutory scheme providing for witnesses who would otherwise be in grave danger, to give their evidence under the protection of anonymity. That evidence is still heard by the defendant and his counsel, as well as by the jury: it is the identity of the witness, not the evidence itself, that is kept confidential.

There is, then, the situation that this Bill seeks to address, where the clash with the principle of open justice is the greater. That is where in civil actions, not just the identity of the witness, but the evidence they give, is kept confidential from one of the parties and their counsel—typically in circumstances where the action is against the state.

My hon. Friend the Member for Aberavon (Dr Francis), who I regret is not in his place at the moment, talked about part 2 being a “radical departure” from accepted principles of the common law. The irony is that the first “radical departure” to establish closed material proceedings came as a result of the decision of the European Court of Human Rights in the Chahal case. As the Minister without Portfolio pointed out, closed material proceedings were established in response to those human rights concerns and at the behest of the same human rights lawyers who are now claiming that closed material proceedings represent some fundamental breach of human rights. If I may say so, they do not, and the Special Immigration Appeals Commission process has been found to be completely consistent with the European convention.

As we know, SIAC’s task is to determine whether a deportation order made against an individual on grounds of national security should be executed. The special advocates see all the evidence, and their duty—formally to the court and not to the client—is to have all the secret evidence tested as forensically as possible before the tribunal, but the deportee cannot know what the evidence is. As a result, there is an especial burden on the tribunal to test this evidence.

Those who are sceptical about SIAC, or any closed material proceedings, need to address themselves to SIAC’s record. I mentioned in an intervention on the Minister without Portfolio that of 37 substantive cases before SIAC since January 2007, in at least seven, SIAC has found against the Government—and the cases do not go there in the first place unless the evidence is quite strong.

SIAC could not operate without closed material proceedings at its heart. The question before the House today is whether such proceedings should be extended to civil actions. In the case of al-Rawi, the Supreme Court decided that if CMP were to be extended to civil actions, that must be a matter for Parliament rather than the courts. Its decision followed the approach of the Law Lords in R v. Davis.

I make no complaint about that. For all the talk about alleged excessive judicial activism, in both cases the Supreme Court and the Law Lords were simply saying “We cannot make the law here in order to extend the law; this is a matter for Parliament.” That seems to me entirely appropriate, and I take issue with the suggestion of my hon. Friend the Member for Aberavon that it was as big a “radical departure” as he and his Committee had claimed. The truth is that there was no necessity for any radical departure in respect of the accountability of the intelligence agencies until 15 years ago, because before then the agencies were not accountable at all. There was no way in the world in which any of these actions would have been entertained. Had they been tried, they would have been struck out by the judge because there was no evidence.

The hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood) is looking at me sceptically, but before 1989, the existence of the agencies was not even admitted publicly. The present situation is relatively new. It arises precisely because of the work done by successive Governments in the last 20 years to make the agencies accountable, and not for any other reason.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Does my right hon. Friend really think that the work of an Intelligence and Security Committee all of whose members have been appointed by the Prime Minister amounts to open and democratic parliamentary scrutiny?

[Mr Straw]

That has been the charge against the ISC in the past, and I am glad that things are going to change. However, I can tell my hon. Friend that I have given evidence to the ISC on a number of occasions, and it is no patsy Committee. It is composed of senior parliamentarians from both Houses, and they do a proper and effective job. The challenge for my hon. Friend is to explain how, given the nature of its subject matter, that job could conceivably be done by means of open hearings. It is not possible. The choice is between an ISC that operates in the way that the Bill proposes, and the absence of any kind of parliamentary scrutiny. I know which I choose.

Let me now deal with the arguments that have been advanced against closed material proceedings. The most frequently used argument is that we should resort to public interest immunity certificates. I accept that, if possible, gisting should be used or the court should sit in camera, but in most cases those options are not possible. Public interest immunity certificates are used fairly often, but they work effectively only when the evidence that they seek to exclude is relatively peripheral to the proceedings. If they are used in relation to evidence that is central to the case, they make it impossible for a trial of the action to take place at all. They do not protect evidence and make it safely usable in court; they exclude it altogether.