Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill

My Lords, the Minister interrupted me when I was reading out her amendment, which refers to,"““a person who fails without reasonable excuse to comply with a requirement””." Surely I am entitled to talk about the circumstances in which a person might not have complied with this requirement, when an operator has failed to notify the authorities of the passenger details of a flight entering the United Kingdom from abroad or starting and finishing in the United Kingdom—that is what I was talking about. It would be extremely important to know whether the CIA flights, referred to by my noble friend Lord Dholakia, would be covered by the provision; if so, the persons who operated those flights would be subject to the penalties in the Minister’s amendment. Surely I am also entitled to refer to correspondence that has taken place since Report between the Minister and my noble friend Lord Dholakia, which we could not have discussed previously and which arises directly from this amendment. I was going to say that, in her letter to my noble friend on 23 February, the Minister said that under the Chicago Convention we have the right to search aircraft of other contracting states and that we have not and will not approve of the transfer of individuals through the UK to places where there are substantial grounds to believe that they would face a risk of torture. We would not assist in any case where to do so would put the UK in breach of international law, including the convention against torture. I only wish to ask the Minister, if I may, whether, since we now know of these flights, the police will require the CIA to provide passenger information using the powers of Clause 32(2), considering that unless there is another, more convincing explanation than we have had so far, there may be grounds for believing that persons on these flights are being conveyed to some other jurisdiction, with a view to committing offences under our domestic law, Section 134 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988.