Counter-Terrorism Bill

moved Amendment No. 105NZA: 105NZA: After Clause 73, insert the following new Clause— ““Amendment to Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 (1) Section 4 of the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 (c. 24) is amended as follows. (2) In subsection (1), before ““The Treasury”” insert ““In cases involving terrorism-related activity,””. (3) After subsection (4) insert— ““(5) For the purposes of this section, ““terrorism-related activity”” has the same meaning as defined in section 1(9) of the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 (meaning of involvement in terrorism-related activity).”””” The noble Baroness said: This amendment is aimed to probe exactly what is caught within the scope of the legislation that the Government are using to make the freezing orders. Laid before the House at the moment is also the Landsbanki Freezing Order 2008, which we may well debate later. For today, I want to take the Chamber back to the original legislation that the Government passed in order to progress the freezing of assets in cases of terrorism, which was of course the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001. That Act was passed in 2001 in a hurry as emergency legislation in response to the 11 September attack. As emergency legislation, that Bill was hardly debated in the Commons, as MPs have subsequently pointed out on several occasions—for example, in the other place on 25 February 2004 at col. 312. David Blunkett’s explanation of the asset-freezing powers at the time, however, was quite clear: "““The emergency legislation will build on the provisions of the Proceeds of Crime Bill to deal specifically with terrorist finance through monitoring and freezing the accounts of suspected terrorists””.—[Official Report, Commons, 15/8/01; col. 923.]" In other words, it was quite clear when they were brought in that these powers were intended for use against terrorists, and we supported them at that time. In this House there was a little more scrutiny, and Members asked the Minister why there was no explicit reference to terrorism in the drafting of the clause. When she was so challenged, the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Symons of Vernham Dean, insisted that the reason why there was no direct mention of terrorism was that, "““it is not possible to separate out the matters in a practical sense because the other crimes are the source of revenue for terrorists””." She also said: "““The Government do not believe that it is possible to define terrorism in a way that would distinguish it from activities related to it””.—[Official Report, 3/9/01; col. 600.]" In other words, the powers were meant to tackle terrorism; they could not be defined too closely but were certainly supposed to tackle crimes connected with terrorism. The problem that the Government have had in recent weeks is that there was no intention on the part of those supporting this legislation that it should be used in matters economic, so that the Government might in this way freeze the assets of another country’s bank, as in the case of Landsbanki. I have tabled this new clause so that the Committee can discuss the principle at stake here. Parliament has provided very serious new powers on terrorism since 2001, and this is one example of where such a power is being used somewhat differently from the way we envisaged. Whether the Government were right, in economic terms, to take the action they did is a different question. The question here is whether we should be using terrorism legislation and associated legislation to achieve a very different end. At this stage, this is a probing amendment to try to make sure that the Government are quite clear under what legislation and to what ends they will be using these powers. I beg to move.