Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill

Zarah Sultana Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 5th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Zarah Sultana (Coventry South) (Lab)]

As I am making the final Back-Bench speech, I will not be taking any interventions—apologies.

On 12 February 1989, Pat Finucane, an Irish lawyer in Belfast, sat at his kitchen table to have dinner with his wife and three children. As they ate, two gunmen burst through the door, entered the room and shot Mr Finucane 14 times. He was killed by a loyalist paramilitary group that, as the Prime Minister at the time, David Cameron, admitted in 2012, was acting in complicity with British security services. Far from stopping Mr Finnigan’s murder, the Prime Minister described the

“shocking levels of state collusion”—[Official Report, 12 December 2012; Vol. 555, c. 296]

in Mr Finucane’s murder. His family are still owed a public inquiry into the murder.

Deeply troubling acts of state agents such as those in the Finucane case are not isolated. In 2010, it came to light that for 40 years, Britain’s police had run covert operations spying on thousands of civilians. More than 1,000 political groups were spied on. Overwhelmingly, it was left-wing, anti-racist and climate justice groups that were spied on, with just three far-right groups included on the list. The spy cops revelations have shown that police operatives deceived women into sexual relationships and even spied on grieving families seeking justice, including the parents of Stephen Lawrence.

This Bill must be opposed. It places no limits on the crimes that state agents can be authorised to commit. It does not prohibit torture. It does not prohibit murder. It does not prohibit sexual violence. Instead, all it requires is that authorising officers themselves believe that the conduct is appropriate, necessary by broadly defined criteria and meets requirements that may be imposed by an order made by the Secretary of State. Even the FBI expressly bans operatives from certain criminal conduct, but this Bill does not ban any type of criminal conduct for British state agents.

The grounds upon which the authorisations can be granted are ill-defined and wide-ranging. They include not only national security but “preventing disorder” and to promote

“the interests of the economic well-being of the United Kingdom.”

That has rightly raised alarm bells for trade unions such as my union, Unite, and justice campaigns such as the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign, who fear that these powers could be used to interfere with the legitimate activities of trade unions.

The Bill grants these powers to a dizzying array of agencies—not just intelligence agencies and the police, but the Competition and Markets Authority, the Gambling Commission and the Environment Agency, just to name a few. The oversight for authorisation of potentially serious crimes is scandalously weak. There are no provisions in the Bill for warrants or independent judicial approval. Instead, authorisation will be granted internally, which means that incredibly serious crimes could be authorised with less oversight than is currently required for phone tapping or police searches. As the human rights group Reprieve has noted, survivors of the spy cops scandal have sought justice through the courts for abuses they suffered, but this Bill will block future claims being brought forward, since it outlaws civil action against authorised activities. That is utterly unconscionable.

In the Bill’s defence, the Government claim that public authorities are bound by the Human Rights Act, and for that reason, the prohibition of crimes such as torture is guarded. In reality, that offers no protection against agent criminality, because in the Government’s view, the Human Rights Act does not apply to crimes committed by covert agents. The Government told the Investigatory Powers Tribunal in November 2019 that, in tasking agents, the state

“is not the instigator of that activity and cannot be treated as responsible for it”.

According to the Government’s own standards, the Bill will therefore not place any limits on the crimes that agents could be authorised to commit—not on torture, not on murder and not on sexual violence.

[Mrs Miller]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Zarah Sultana]

I must make progress.

This Bill marks the latest step in a frightening descent into authoritarianism by this Government. In the past two weeks, they have proposed the effective decriminalisation of torture by British soldiers overseas, the shipping of asylum seekers more than 4,000 miles away to be imprisoned on Ascension Island, the ban on anti-capitalist teaching materials in schools and now this—licensing undercover agents to commit torture, sexual violence and murder. This descent into authoritarianism should be a concern to us all. It must be resisted.