Justice and Security (Northern Ireland) Bill

I rise to support the second amendment. This is an important matter because trial by jury has always been regarded as a particularly precious right, no less in Northern Ireland than in England and Wales, and for all I know in Scotland too. A few moments ago the noble and learned Lord the Attorney-General distinguished between the right to jury trial and the right to a fair trial, and I think most people would regard it as their understanding of their primary rights in our constitutional law that they are entitled to a jury trial save where Parliament has intervened to restrict that right in the light of special circumstances or criteria. It has to be said rather ruefully that since the present emergency revived in 1969, those special circumstances have impinged very painfully and urgently on everyone in Northern Ireland. It was because of those circumstances that, in his report published in 1973, Lord Diplock made the recommendations with which we are all now very familiar. The norm has been that quite a wide swathe of offences should not attract the right to trial by jury, the reason being that they are commonly associated with terrorism—to use an umbrella word. The arrangement has been that the Attorney-General of the day—I thought that it was the Attorney-General for Northern Ireland, which I regarded myself as being, as well as the Attorney-General for England and Wales—was able to certify them out. I repeatedly came under considerable pressure when I was Attorney-General, as well as when I was Secretary of State, to reverse that arrangement, so that the provisions of the present Bill should be substituted for what I have just described, save that it was not a case of a certificate issued by the DPP. I always resisted that because it is important for the status of the Attorney-General and the standing of his office that, where he is given a discretionary power to intervene, it should be on the side of upholding the liberties of the subject, not restricting them. It is not becoming—in fact, it is rather dangerous—that the Attorney-General should have been empowered to remove the right of trial by jury from a defendant. The arrangement here is that the Director of Public Prosecutions shall certify with that consequence. There is a separate point here. I cannot think it right that an official, however distinguished and however impartial—and there can be none more deserving of each of those tributes than the present incumbent—should be vested with such power. He is not accountable to Parliament. We have had that debate quite recently in this House and a very large number of your Lordships thought that somebody with powers in this field should be accountable to Parliament. The Attorney-General, of course, is—as the present incumbent of that office has good reason to know. He has frequently recounted the number of occasions on which he has recently appeared before Parliament, answered letters and so forth. That is an important additional point. In Northern Ireland, the director is subject to being directed by the Attorney-General. I will be corrected if I am wrong about that, but I always understood that to be the case, although I never sought to avail myself of that power. The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, in answering the debate on Second Reading, said that a good reason for making the change in the Bill was that the Attorney-General was a Westminster Minister and that it was not appropriate that a Westminster Minister should have the say-so in a matter of this importance in Northern Ireland. The fact that the Attorney-General can direct the Director of Public Prosecutions goes in some ways against that point. So I shall be very interested to hear what the noble and learned Lord the Attorney-General has to say in answer both to this amendment and to the other two that have been spoken to.