Counter-Terrorism Bill

My Lords, techniques of terrorism cannot be disinvented. The challenge is to contain and minimise the likelihood of their deployment and to isolate or marginalise those who would be prepared to deploy them. In this, Governments have a priority responsibility. It is their duty to protect those within their jurisdiction and it is therefore right that we should pay generous tribute to those servants of the state and to Ministers themselves who tirelessly seek to honour that responsibility. I have been greatly impressed of late by those in the front line of the essential battle for hearts and minds who have told me that what arguably matters most is the credibility of transparent integrity and consistency in all that is done. Like those operational policemen who have explained their anxieties, I am not convinced that the possibility of 42-day pre-charge detention will help. Quite the reverse. Like them, I fear that it will be counterproductive—that the advantages will be outweighed by the disadvantages. It is likely, as my noble friend Lord Ahmed has just said, to play into the hands of the manipulators and could well amount, in effect, to acting out a script written by bin Laden himself. The noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, has covered the same area. It will certainly give ammunition to the manipulators. Most of the Islamic community and most followers of other faiths are certainly not open to such manipulation, but acts of terrorism do not require large battalions. They are undertaken by small numbers of dedicated people. Just a few more carefully selected additional recruits can prove hugely significant. Terrorists operate more effectively when there is a climate of ambivalence—when significant numbers of people, who themselves totally reject acts of terrorism, nevertheless sometimes believe that the cause with which terrorists attempt to justify their action may well be valid. That is why it is dangerously naive to argue that there is no recognisable political agenda with which the terrorists seek to identify. We may not like the agenda or support it and we may totally condemn, without reservation, the self-defeating, cruel methods applied for pursuing it, but to pretend that it is not there fosters the ambiguity to which I have just referred. The agenda is about value systems and the prevailing global, economic, social, environmental and power structures in the world. It is about Palestine, the Middle East and the existing traditional order in a number of Arab states. It is about overt and covert racism, exclusion, oppression, humiliation and a search for identity. In this context, I have been deeply impressed by police and others actively engaged in the hearts and minds work who have suggested to me that people with whom it is essential to be in dialogue and to whom it is vital to listen include militants who are not, at least as yet, terrorists. Such militants, they believe, have street credibility. Hearts and minds processes have to be as inclusive as it is possible to make them. Policing is only highly successful when it is undertaken with the community. That is why we have to take seriously, and be seen to take seriously, the perceived injustices that determine the agenda. That is why support for meaningful negotiations in the Middle East is highly relevant and why every sinew should be stretched to bring Hamas into those negotiations. It is why G8 summits matter in terms of economic, social and environmental justice for the world. It is why our immigration system and the real human experiences of those caught up in it matter so much. It is why the vocabulary and demeanour of the media and politicians towards these ethnic minorities and would-be immigrants are so crucial. It is why the temptation to play to the gallery of prejudice, apart from being utterly distasteful, is potentially disastrous. We seek to defend the lives of our people. What are those lives? The right to be alive is basic, but health, shelter, nourishment and economic and employment prospects are all part of it. So, also—crucially—are our liberty and our system of justice, so painfully forged in our history: habeas corpus; justice being seen to be done; equality before the law; not being held without charge; presumption of innocence; cross-examination of witnesses, and the rest. The independence of the judiciary is a pillar of our judicial system and it is essential always to be absolutely clear what is the judicial role and what is the parliamentary legislative role. They are not the same. It is surely when the going gets tough and the provocation is most acute that we have to reassert a manifestly transparent determination to stand by all these principles. Otherwise we give the extremists the victory and we aid and abet their manipulations. We water the seeds of doubt and alienation. In Committee, it will be vital to examine the Bill against all these considerations. Why is 42 days proposed, when nobody has been held for more than 14 days in the past year? Are we being invited to make a possible future convenience more important than a fundamental legal principle? Is it possible that it could really be about appeasing the worst tabloids? What alternatives, including, for example, police bail safeguards, have been examined? How has the lasting psychological damage, with its long-term consequences for those incarcerated in isolation, been considered? Anyway, how reliable is intelligence secured in these conditions? Why have we not yet moved forward on the availability of intercept intelligence, of course with essential safeguards, in those court cases where everybody knows that it is central to the situation? Are we confident that the hearings for the extension of detention meet the basic requirements of adversarial justice? What are the misgivings of the special advocates about the procedures of which they are a part? Will not the new proposals for the coroners’ courts contradict the cause of transparent justice, especially when servants or agents of the state may have been involved in a death? Faced with the grim realities of what confronts us, we must beware of counterproductivity. Are we sure that the Bill avoids that trap? We must not become party to compounding the dangers. The centuries of struggle for liberty and equality before the law in our own society have been, by definition, for inclusive, not exclusive or partial, application. The statesmen and stateswomen of the 1940s, with all the searing experience of the Second World War behind them, got it right in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The point was that, as a muscular cornerstone of a decent, stable and secure society, fundamental rights were there for everybody, not just for some. We go down the road of selective application of rights at our peril. In the end, we could all be the victims of such a process.