Counter-Terrorism Bill

My Lords, some months ago in a debate in this House I suggested to the Government that we should adopt an element of continental law to deal with this very tiny but particularly dangerous group of suspects. In a curious sort of way, that is being accepted in this Bill. The idea of 42 days under the supervision of a judge is not very different from what happens in continental Europe, where they hold people for much longer but under the supervision of a magistrate. It is an important point. Liberty and other groups are wrong to say that we compare badly with other countries on this. I know that as an ex-MP who intervened on many occasions to try to get people out of French jails, in particular. They would be held for long periods of time while an examination went on; then suddenly they would be deported to such beacons of liberty as Algeria without as much as a by-your-leave. I have to say that the situation in Europe in terms of being a terrorist suspect is not good. In the United States, Australia and other countries with the English common-law system, there are also problems. In the United States, leaving aside the horror of Guantanamo Bay, they use much more surveillance—and there are obvious implications in that for resources—but they also do something that we used to do here many years ago, which they also do in Australia. They give the nod and the wink to the magistrate or the judge that you were charging a person with a lower offence but that you did not want that person to get bail because you envisaged a much more serious offence. I do not know whether that was done with terrorism cases, but I do know—and I speak as an ex-probation officer—that it frequently happened for common offences. Fortunately, thanks to people like me, people in the other House and my noble friend Lady Stern, who all argued that bail should not be used in that way, it is now much more difficult to give a nod and a wink. When I was a probation officer, I often looked in law books to see whether I could find ““nod”” and ““wink”” defined, but nothing was there. The reality is that we did that—as many of the lawyers here will know—as a way of holding a person while more serious charges were considered. I do not want to go back to that, which is why I say to the Government that I would prefer to adopt an element of continental law for this tiny number of particularly serious cases. To some extent, we seem to be going down that road, because with the supervision of a judge and other safeguards, the safeguards in place are much greater. The noble Lord, Lord Carlile, is right when he says that if you are suspected of a terrorist offence in Britain you have a better chance of having your civil rights respected than in most other countries. The underlying reason why he is right, without going into the details because I do not have time, is that we have had experience since 1969 of learning by our mistakes. The big mistake of course was internment. The United States has Guantanamo Bay, which is internment writ large. Internment was bad news. I want to say a couple of things about the past in relation to this because I have heard some speeches today from people who would have made very different speeches in the 1980s—people from politics, the law, the intelligence services and the police—who were strongly in favour of the old Prevention of Terrorism Act, which was worse than this legislation. I will say why. Internment was not part of the old Prevention of Terrorism Act. It was a big mistake that we should put to one side. Look instead at exclusion orders. Exclusion orders were defined not only by me but by others as internal exile. It was the first time in the history of United Kingdom since Henry VIII that a political person—the Secretary of State—had the power to say, ““You cannot move from one part of the United Kingdom to another””. That was done by the Home Secretary. It was defended hotly by the Conservative Party and the Liberals, and people like me who opposed it at the time were told that we were being irresponsible and that we ought to allow the security forces to have this power because they needed it. The exclusion order was bad news in terms of the principles of civil liberty and it was eventually dropped. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Mayhew, who is in his place and who I wish had said this, recognised that it needed to be dropped. The John Major Government, to some extent, amended some of that legislation in a way that we then continued, which was when things began to change for the better. Then there was the use of the old Prevention of Terrorism Act. Up to 6,000 people per annum were taken in for questioning under that Act, of which only about 5 per cent were charged and only about 2.5 per cent were charged with anything relating to terrorism. There is not a recruiting sergeant major for the IRA or al-Qaeda in the sense that someone who has a bad experience in a court of law then goes outside and blows themselves up. People do that for other reasons as well. What internment did and what the sweeping up powers of the old Prevention of Terrorism Act did was to make people nervous—particularly people from the Catholic and Irish communities—about giving information to the police in case they were held under those powers. That is where it undermined the approach of winning hearts and minds. It is not just a recruitment sergeant major in the simple sense. That point was also recognised because, to some extent under John Major's Government, the use of those powers was drastically reduced. Again, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mayhew, would know about that and I wish that he had said so. The situation has also improved in other ways. There was no video or recording of interviews. I was responsible as a probation officer for one of the people wrongly held and sentenced to many years’ imprisonment for one of the pub bombings. A very young person, under the influence of drugs, did not know what time of day it was and confessed. That person was still confessing to me literally a year later, part way through the sentence, on the grounds that ““I must have done it; they said so, didn’t they?””. The reality is that if you are not allowed to see a solicitor—which you were not for the first seven days—or family or friends, you are on your own. That is no longer true, and has not been for some time. You can now have more safeguards. There is a danger, as we all know, of serious terrorist attacks. Whenever that happens, the mood of the country changes, which is how we originally got the old Prevention of Terrorism Act. That is the important point. It is why the Conservative, Labour and Liberal parties all supported it at the time, and why a number of them—including some members of my own—went on supporting it when it had the internal exile and the sweeping-up powers I have referred to. That has gone, and we must ensure that it stays out of the legislation. We must be much more focused. I congratulate the police because they do not use powers in that way. The Minister will correct me if I am wrong, but I understand that we have never held more than 1,000—as opposed to 6,000 under the old Prevention of Terrorism Act—charging more of them as a result with them either pleading guilty or being found guilty. In other words, we have become more intelligent with how we use it. I say to the parties opposite and some of my own colleagues that the key is to recognise that we need to hold people longer. I would prefer the continental law system, even if it upsets lawyers here; they say ““We cannot do this, this is English law””. Frankly, tough. We can do it and we should. We must then focus on how to prevent wrongful convictions and avoid sweeping people up into the net, so that they are then frightened to give evidence to the police. That is the key to this and, staggeringly, we are getting there, albeit in a series of steps. I wish that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mayhew, had made this point because, to be fair, John Major’s Government started that process.