Justice and Security Bill [Lords]

Debate between Julian Brazier and Lord Clarke of Nottingham

Monday 4th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

I do not think that I would conceivably use the language that my hon. Friend tries to attribute to me. Human rights Members are fervently opposed to the whole idea of CMP. They are extremely able lawyers and draftsmen. I am left in wonder and admiration at their ingenuity in producing an endless procession of amendments, so that every time their principles are adopted by the Government in amendments at various stages, a fresh set of amendments is tabled introducing new concepts that are designed to elaborate on the process. That is enough praise for my opponents, but it is ingenious.

We are not putting in the Wiley test, because we have three perfectly effective tests and complete discretion for the judge anyway. The Wiley test is used for PII, which is a quite different process that tries to exclude the evidence entirely from the judge, the claimant, the lawyers and everybody. PII is an application for total silence. We do not need to put the test in for that.

Amendment 31 is more difficult, as it requires that a CMP may be used only as a last resort. The circumstances I have described are getting pretty near to the last resort. We expect only a handful of cases, because we do not think our intelligence agencies will be sued very often. They are strictly enjoined to follow the principles of human rights, and not to connive at torture and everything else, but we do not know, and the conditions we have applied make it clear that we will only ever have CMPs in national security cases, unless a future Government try to relax them.

The trouble is that the last resort argument will undoubtedly be used for going through the whole PII process before starting on CMPs, and there are some people who want to do that. They say that they do not like the fact that the Secretary of State has to consider an application for PII. They want the Secretary of State to go through the whole process. They do not like the fact that the court has other tests for going to a CMP. They want the court to go through the whole PII process before it gets there. Why? Because it could take months or years. The Guantanamo Bay cases had hundreds of thousands of documents—it is a very elaborate process.

[Mr Julian Brazier (Canterbury) (Con)]

Will my right hon. and learned Friend give way?

[Mr Clarke]

I will in just a second.

There is a serious risk, in our opinion and in the opinion of those who have considered the drafting, that it will introduce a huge, expensive and discouraging process. David Anderson, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, has described this sort of clause as requiring the court to bang its head against a brick wall. I think the Lords Constitution Committee also said that it did not want full PII. The hon. Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter), who led for the Opposition, said this:

“None of us wants exhaustive PII or a Minister tied up for a year exhaustively going through paperwork, if it were obvious to all concerned that it was not needed”.––[Official Report, Justice and Security (Lords) Public Bill Committee, 5 February 2013; c. 167.]

We are resisting amendment 31 because we think ingenious lawyers will use the argument that we have to settle down to a few years of process and paperwork to satisfy the requirement exhaustively to consider every other possible way of trying the case.