Detainee Inquiry

Pete Wishart Excerpts

Wednesday 18th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

We have not taken any decisions yet about the exact point at which we will start constituting a new judge-led inquiry or approaching a judge and people who might wish to serve on the inquiry. What we did this time was to set up the Gibson inquiry in the belief that we were about to start imminently—going into the full formal stage after a few months of preparation. Presumably, we will try to repeat that, but at this stage it is impossible to know when we will be in a position to do that. At the moment, we want to review the facts of these cases so I do not feel the need to create a new appointment to review the legislation in this area; indeed, I would argue, subject to what emerges, that the law in this area is reasonably clear. It is the facts that we hope to investigate, and then the application of the law to those facts.

[Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)]

Is not the real lesson of Gibson that important inquiries such as this cannot proceed properly without the full confidence of all interests and participants? What is the Justice Secretary doing to ensure that any future inquiries will have the full confidence of all human rights groups and all lawyers involved in such cases?

[Mr Clarke]

I have met a very wide range NGOs, human rights groups and those with an interest, and I have been trying to persuade them that the Gibson inquiry is something that they should get engaged with. I very much hope still to see them doing that. I am still having meetings about the Green Paper on security and justice and of course on the supervision of the security services. My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary was here earlier; we will continue to engage. I agree that it would be very much better if we could get the NGOs and others to accept that this is the way to proceed. We will continue to listen to their arguments about why they feel that they cannot, and we will do our best.