Terrorism Bill

My Lords, I want to make one or two points that have not yet been made. I agree with the general thrust of all the speeches that have been made. First, in dealing with the rest of the world, I am not aware that in the United States such an offence could possibly pass muster under the first amendment because of the strong constitutional guarantee of free speech. I am not aware that any other country party to the United Nations resolution has introduced such an offence. The only state I know of that had something similar was Spain. When Spain introduced that offence it was challenged before the constitutional court of Spain which decided that it was unconstitutional in the form in which it was expressed. We are therefore doing something unique—and uniquely bad—in lawmaking. When my friend and colleague the noble Lord, Lord Judd, and I and others on the Joint Committee on Human Rights visited Madrid recently—Spain is the European state that has faced even more terrorism than us, both from ETA and the Madrid bombings—to inquire about its counter-terrorist measures we had the privilege of meeting Ministers, the public prosecutor and senior judges and asking questions about their pattern of lawmaking. One of the questions was whether they considered it necessary in Spain in their counter-terrorist measures to detain people, for example, for up to 90 days without charge or by having the offence of glorified terrorism. The answer we received was, ““No, we don’t consider it necessary. What you do not need is more laws. What you do need is to make the existing laws work properly””. That seems correct to me. We have a vast armoury in our criminal law of offences against public order of one kind or another; they cover all the disgraceful events of the recent demonstrations. They cover everything from incitement to murder to other, lesser crimes against public order. The amendments this House agreed upon would make the offence of direct and indirect encouragement of terrorism workable and effective. I believe that the inclusion of glorification will make the offence, if applied in any way at all, contrary to Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights and the Human Rights Act. I do not see the point in passing legislation that will lead to a result in our courts that none of us would wish to see. This is not the first time we have faced political speech crimes of this kind. As we all remember, we did so with regard to the offence of stirring up religious hatred, and on all sides of this House we managed to amend a manifesto Bill to make absolutely sure that freedom of speech would be effectively protected. In the other place, the opposition parties and Labour Back-Benchers joined together in a great alliance in      order to copper-fasten those amendments. Unfortunately that could not be accomplished on this occasion, so the Bill has returned to this House. It is a manifesto Bill, as was the other one. On the face of it there is no specific guarantee of free expression of the kind we put into the other one. The other offences were much less serious—they were not concerned with terrorism—and yet we managed to get adequate safeguards. We do not have such safeguards in this Bill, and I believe it would not be contrary to the Salisbury convention, or any other convention of this House, to send it back again to the other place so that it could be improved. Then we could have something on the face of the Bill that would work in practice and not be counterproductive.