I accept my hon. Friend’s point, but for my own part I do not think the risk is nearly as great, and I would go further than that. If we carry on calling CMPs “secret courts”, there might be that risk, but we are not talking about secret courts. We are talking about courts in which defendants and claimants are properly represented, where there is access to the information necessary to ensure as fair a resolution of the issues between the parties as possible and, indeed, where the proceedings are overseen by a judge. I shall come back to this in a moment, but the alternative in many of these cases is, as I said in an intervention on my hon. Friend, that there is no justice at all—either because they are struck out or because the Government have to settle them. That is totally unsatisfactory—much more so than the Government’s proposals in the Bill. I think it was the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation who said that we were in the world of second-best
solutions, and indeed we are. No one wishes to see this legislation. I myself have described it as at best undesirable, and possibly pernicious. However, we are where we are. We face the threats that we face, and we have to deal with them.
My fourth reason for thinking that the Bill deserves a Second Reading is that, at present, justice is not done at all in many cases of this kind. As I said earlier, the Government, because they cannot disclose information, are obliged to settle some cases when a perfectly good defence is available to the security services. There are, potentially, other cases—and at least one, which I mentioned earlier, may have already arisen—in which a claimant has a legitimate cause of action which may or may not be capable of being sustained at trial, but owing to the success of a public interest immunity application, information that would otherwise have enabled the issues between the parties to be properly resolved is not available.
In a third group of cases, such as the Carnduff case, there is the possibility of a stay if the public interest immunity application fails, and those are the cases that trouble me particularly. Claimants are essentially being told, “You may have a perfectly good cause of action, but the public interest of protecting national security outweighs the public interest of doing justice in your case.” That seems to me much more undesirable than saying to a claimant, “You may press ahead, but part of the proceedings will take place in a forum that is no longer open to the public.”
The Bill may indeed be a second-best or an undesirable solution, and part 2, at least, may even constitute a pernicious piece of legislation. However, for the four reasons that I have given, I approve of the principle behind it. I believe that that principle has been generally accepted throughout this House, and was finally accepted by their lordships, subject to the amendments that they made. It is a principle from which I do not believe parliamentarians can legitimately distance themselves. It is the principle that we need to be here to protect our constituents, and it is the principle that no matter how unsatisfactory the Bill is, it is the right Bill, and, regrettably, a necessary measure.
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