Justice and Security Bill [HL]

Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts Excerpts

Wednesday 11th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts]

My Lords, I have amendments in this group that refer to the inability of parties other than the Secretary of State to access CMPs. Amendment 41 and consequential Amendment 50 would omit “The Secretary of State” from the first line of Clause 6(1) and replace it with:

“Any party to relevant proceedings”.

I propose this on the grounds of fairness. Throughout the briefing and our debates so far, the Government have stressed the importance of fairness. In my view, the present drafting of the clause represents an unacceptable inequality of arms. A party who is suing the Government has no right to apply for a CMP, yet one of the justifications for CMPs in the Green Paper was unfairness to claimants. The Green Paper claimed that some claimants might find their cases being struck out because a fair trial was impossible due to the fact that the issues were so steeped in secret, undisclosable material that the Government would be unable to defend themselves. The Government claimed CMPs would be necessary to protect the claimants from that eventuality.

In the Government’s briefing, which they circulated ahead of the proceedings on this Bill, they said:

“It is also clear that in some cases, the absence of CMPs is particularly unfair on the claimant. In a recent naturalisation case (AHK and Others) the judge ruled that without any means by which sensitive intelligence could be heard in court, ‘the Claimant is bound to lose, no matter how weak the grounds against him, there is obvious scope for unfairness towards a Claimant’”.

If it is advantageous to any party to use closed material proceedings, why should they not be able to so?