It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Chichester (Mr Tyrie). I want to put on record my thanks to, and admiration for, him for forming the all-party group on extraordinary rendition and his work on exposing the awfulness of extraordinary rendition and how many Governments, either willingly or unwillingly, were deceived into allowing it to take place through their jurisdictions. The House owes him a debt of gratitude for that.
The hon. Gentleman is also right about the speed with which we are considering the Bill. I suspect we will return to major human rights issues in the near future. The Commission on a Bill of Rights has just published its report, which makes excellent reading. I urge all parliamentarians who see their role as protecting civil liberties in our society to read the authoritative essay in the report by Baroness Helena Kennedy and Phillipe Sands QC. They make the point of building on the past rather than destroying the march towards an open society in which we have genuinely independent judicial systems.
I want the House to consider the Bill—particularly in Committee when we come to reform it—in the context of the power of the secret state: the very large power held by the security services in our society and how, in every western state, they have grown enormously since 2001 and the declaration of the war on terror.
Guantanamo Bay is a product of that thinking. It is a most evil institution that has treated people abominably, denied them any right to justice or proper access to judicial process, and tortured them and kept them there for many years. Our country took part in the extraordinary rendition of people from Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay. Indeed, rendition even took place through Diego Garcia, which is part of the British Indian Ocean Territory, by the use of the US base there.
Political opportunism led us from being an enemy of Colonel Gaddafi to being a friend of Colonel Gaddafi then an arms supplier to Colonel Gaddafi. We were apparently so involved in his operations that our security services were prepared to hijack one of his enemies from another jurisdiction and take him back to Libya, where he was subsequently tortured by Gaddafi’s henchmen. That information was uncovered only in the chaos and rubble of Tripoli. So far £2.2 million has been paid in compensation, which I assume avoids the embarrassment of an open court case with Sami al-Saadi. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) pointed out, the Belhaj case is still pending and cannot be discussed. There is a lesson here about our easy acceptance of the power of the secret state and the security services, which has led us to this appalling situation where that amount of money has to be paid because of clear transgressions of the rights and justice of an individual who was standing up for the society he believed in—something that we claim to want all around the world.
The Bill deals with two or three issues that I want to cover briefly in the short time available, the first of which is parliamentary oversight. When I first came into the House in 1983, there was no parliamentary oversight of security services at all. It was an article of faith in the Labour party at that time—my right hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley (Mr Howarth) and I may agree on this particular point—that there should have been some parliamentary oversight of the security services. There we have it—agreement on this occasion.