Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for what she kindly said about this debate, but I should have thought that she and I would agree on this without hesitation. So far as is possible, no one should be detained and deprived of their liberty in circumstances where ultimately they are not going to be charged with a criminal offence, or for some other good reason. I do not like the idea of saying, ““Oh well, it is all right, because after a night out in the pub, people may be locked up for a night; let us lock up the Foreign Minister””, or a general from another state. If there will not be a prosecution, it makes no sense to do that. The other fundamental difference is the second element missing from the debate. Parliament has decided that in such an offence, universal jurisdiction is enormously important and we should do our bit to ensure that tyrants, despots and war criminals do not find a place of refuge in this country. Absolutely, but it has decided that that should be done by giving the ultimate responsibility to the Attorney-General to decide whether prosecution takes place. The anomaly is that, despite that, prosecutions can be started and people can be detained, even though that will not happen. I conclude by saying that I support the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew. It is a sound amendment. If I may tell tales out of school, when I was in office, I tried to resuscitate the war crimes unit, which had existed. The problem—I address these remarks absolutely at the Minister—is resources from the police. The police have to do the investigation. The prosecutors can help, and I hope that, despite cuts, they will be able to help, but ultimately the police have to do that. For example, to bring the Zardad prosecution, we had to have Metropolitan Police officers in Afghanistan. We had to find the evidence and give it by video conference to a court in the Old Bailey, which was an interesting experience in itself for the jurors, who were not quite sure what they were watching. It is a much more onerous obligation to prosecute those cases. That is one of the public interest considerations which someone might well take into account, especially if there is another country, including the home country, which looks as if it is capable and willing to prosecute the case itself, which is one of the principles under the International Criminal Court treaty, the Rome treaty: the principle of complementarity. I support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, but I respectfully oppose the other amendments.