Terrorism Bill

Although I am sure that our debate on these amendments will be somewhat shorter than our debate on the previous group, they are detailed and controversial and I have no doubt that they will be subjected to proper scrutiny this afternoon. The amendments relate to clause 3, which extends to the internet the offences set in clauses 1 and 2—encouragement to terrorism and dissemination of terrorist publications. I am sure that the House does not disagree with the principle of the clause that knowingly encouraging terrorism through the internet should be a crime. We have all heard about the radical material that is sometimes distributed via the internet and on the worldwide web, and the damage that it can cause. However, in applying the offences in clauses 1 and 2 to the internet, we faced a significant problem relating to knowledge of the offence. As we all know, it is possible for someone who runs a bulletin board-style website to be unaware of the content posted on it. Clause 3 provides for a notice and take-down procedure to enable the police to notify those who are unaware of offending material of its presence and to request them to remove it from the public view. If they choose not to remove the material, they will be deemed to have endorsed it and they will lose the chance, if they are prosecuted under clauses 1 or 2, to use the defence of non-endorsement set out in those clauses. The House should bear in mind, first, that refusal to obey the notice and take-down procedure is not an offence in itself. The legal effect of refusing to comply with the notice is merely that the statutory defences in clauses 1 and 2 of non-endorsement are not open to be used by the person in question. Secondly, even if an individual fails to comply with the notice, the prosecution will still have to prove that they intended to encourage terrorism or to make information or assistance available to terrorists, or they were subjectively reckless about that. Those are significant burdens on the prosecution. The clause provides simply that someone who chooses to ignore the notice and take- down procedure will not be able to avail themselves of the simple statutory defence of non-endorsement; the prosecution will still have to prove the offence. The intention behind clause 3 was to provide a method by which webmasters could be made aware of content on their websites, thus ensuring that they could not claim not to have known about it if they were subsequently prosecuted. The internet is a fast-moving medium. In the field of removal of child pornography, in which the UK is the acknowledged world leader, it is accepted that offensive material can change location several times in one day. Shifts in location can take place between different computer servers, across countries and across continents.