Terrorist Asset-Freezing etc. Bill [HL]

My Lords, I add my voice to the chorus of those congratulating the Minister on having contemplated our views over the summer and having come up with these clauses. Before going into the substantive points that I want to make, I will touch on the technical point of amendments to amendments and hope that we will be able to revisit it. I went to the Table Office, or duty Clerk’s office, on Monday at 4.20 pm and was told that even on that day I was already too late. I received the letter from the Minister detailing his reasons for these amendments—it was very gratefully received and I cannot thank him enough for it—at 6.30 on Monday evening. For obvious reasons, it had not yet been placed in the Library, so there was absolutely no possibility of scrutinising the amendments with a view to doing anything about them. On the test of reasonable suspicion, the Minister said in his opening remarks that we should not use the same level of safeguard across all legislation. That somewhat concerned me because, as other noble Lords have said, there is nevertheless a relationship with the control orders regime. My noble friend Lady Hamwee has referred to the Supreme Court’s rulings in the Ahmed case, where the noble and learned Lord, Lord Rodger, said that, "““the harsh reality is that mistakes in designating will inevitably occur and, when they do, the individuals who are wrongly designated will find their funds and assets frozen and their lives disrupted, without … having any realistic prospect of putting matters right””." I accept that this will now apply only for a period of 30 days, but when your employer and all and sundry around the work that you do are told that your assets have been frozen on the basis of your having been a designated person under terrorism legislation, that has its implications for your future employment. It is not just that your assets are frozen for a period and you hope that you will be non-designated. It affects not only your family and friends but your future employment prospects, so it is perhaps more serious. The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, referred to the 30-day freezing as ““inconvenient””. I suggest respectfully to him that it is potentially more than inconvenient. I wonder whether the noble Lord can tell us why he chose 30 days for these interim orders rather than, perhaps, 45 days as I expect the Treasury’s civil servants or certainly the Home Office’s would have sought. Why did he not choose 14 days, or 31 days or 29? What is the magic cut-off whereby information will become available on the 30th day that was not available on the 29th? The Minister also said that there are other countries with similar systems. I wonder whether he could share with us the other countries that have such a low test, even for an interim order of 30 days in the first instance. It would be helpful to know whether they have similar systems to ours.