The hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) does no service to the causes in which she believes by the extraordinary exaggeration of her remarks, although she is not the only one. I noticed, for example, that Shami Chakrabarti—who really ought to know better—referred to:
“Government arguments for morphing British courts into shadowy Soviet-style commissions”,
and that Amnesty International said that the system could come
“straight from the pages of a Kafka novel”.
The hon. Lady must try to rely on facts and not on rhetoric. For example, we have the constant use of the phrase “secret courts” but there are to be no secret courts. We are talking about cases in which the vast majority of evidence will be heard in open session. If closed material procedures do apply, they will apply usually to a very modest part of the total evidence. Thousands of civil cases are brought each year and estimates for how many cases would be affected by CMPs are somewhere between seven and 15 a year. The idea that we are transforming our society into one in which civil liberties are not recognised does not bear credence.
I have been somewhat amused by the extraordinary affection that has grown over the past 15 years for public interest immunity certificates. As I mentioned earlier, I signed one of those and I remember hearing howls of execration from the Labour Benches at the time and from the whole civil liberties movement. We were told that public interest immunity certificates were going to send innocent people to jail and do all sorts of terrible things that were incompatible with a free society. Well, we have moved on. Those who denigrated PIIs now see them as a way of preserving our liberties against evil Governments, intelligence agencies and the like.
Let us consider the views of those who have had greatest involvement in such matters, and remind the House what has been said by two people when comparing PIIs with closed material procedures. Lord Carlile, formerly a Liberal Democrat Member of this House and independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, said:
“CMP hearings, with special advocates representing the interests of the individual litigant concerned, are fairer and more searching than the significantly more secretive PII hearings process.”
Lord Justice Woolf, in addition to other remarks that have been cited, said he thought Lord Carlile was right and that
“in most situations that are covered by the Bill the result will be preferable to both sides”—
that is crucial; it will be preferable not just to the Government or the defendants, but to the plaintiff as well—
“if the closed hearing procedure is adopted rather than PII, because PII has the very unfortunate effect that you cannot rely on the material that is in issue, whereas both the claimant and the Government”—
not just the Government; the claimant as well—
“may want to rely on that material. That is a good reason for having the closed-hearing procedure.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 11 July 2012; Vol. 738, c. 1189.]