Draft Terrorism Act 2000 (Proscribed Organisations) (Amendment) (No. 2) Order 2019

Nick Thomas-Symonds Excerpts

Thursday 31st October 2019 General Committees

[Nick Thomas-Symonds (Torfaen) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Austin. It is good to be here with strength of numbers to put the case this morning. [Interruption.] Company is always welcome. I should say, by way of apology, that my Whip, my hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe, is on two simultaneous Committees but will attend in a moment.

Reluctantly, I rise to oppose the draft order. I have never opposed any proscription application in the time I have done this job, but this is the first de-proscription that I have dealt with. Let me explain my logic.

The Minister is entirely right about the application of section 3(5) of the 2000 Act, and I have no doubt that he has applied it appropriately and carefully. The issue is about my having the appropriate information to scrutinise the draft order properly. Of course I would never expect any disclosures at the level of comments about specific intelligence, but I would have hoped for a higher level of disclosure than I have been privy to.

The shadow Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott), was sent a letter that stated:

“This decision is based on the lack of contemporary evidence of LIFG’s involvement in terrorist activity, as it is defunct. This in no way invalidates their previous proscription.”

Of course it is entirely correct that the decision will not invalidate the previous proscription, and the intelligence may well state that there is a lack of involvement in terrorist activity. Beyond that, however, I have very little to go on.

At present there is no annual review of proscribed organisations, although there have been arguments about that; Lord Anderson, the former independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, has often argued for it, and I have had the same discussion with the Minister’s predecessor, the right hon. Member for Wyre and Preston North (Mr Wallace). That means that someone must have applied for the group to be de-proscribed, and it must have been someone within the organisation or affected by the proscription. There may be a very good reason why I do not know who that person is, but I stand here today not knowing who they are or why such a step might have been taken.

There is concern about what will happen if the organisation is reactivated. I entirely take the point that the intelligence picture may show that it is defunct at the moment, but surely if there is any possibility that it will be re-established, it would be better to leave it on the proscription register. On a further point, I have not seen anything about whether the organisation has frozen assets or what will happen to them in the event of de-proscription.

Finally, there was extensive media coverage back in 2017. For example, The Daily Telegraph printed claims on 24 May 2017 from a former Libyan security official that:

“Ramadan Abedi, the father of bomber Salman Abedi, was a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a militant group founded in 1995 to pursue the violent overthrow of Gaddafi’s military dictatorship”.

The Guardian reported the same allegation on the same day. Of course, it may be that the organisation was defunct before that, and that Salman Abedi’s father was a member in the past, rather than at that time. However, I just do not know the precise situation.

I take this decision carefully, and my judgment is that I will divide the Committee on the order, simply because I do not feel that I have the level of information that I have had on previous proscription decisions to enable me to provide appropriate scrutiny of the decision.