As the Member for Holborn and St Pancras, whose constituency and constituents experienced the bombs on the tube at Russell square and on the bus at Tavistock square, I am second to no one in my desire to prevent terrorism from taking place in this country. It behoves all of us to do whatever we can to protect people in this country from terrorism and not to have terrorists on the loose, whether they are home-grown and have not been abroad, foreigners who come here, or British citizens returning to Britain. Those British citizens have rights and duties. One of their most important rights is the right of abode in this country as a citizen, but they also have a duty not to break our law or, as I understand it, international law.
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The British Government also have rights and duties in this regard: a right to enforce the law, a duty to comply with the rule of law, and a duty to protect all our citizens, whoever they may be and wherever they may be. If British citizens abroad are suspected of terrorism by British officialdom—by the British Government and their agencies—then the British Government have a duty to bring them to justice, but in the process of doing so, they cannot stop them being treated as British citizens.
Temporary exclusion orders are in danger of neither protecting people’s fundamental rights nor getting people brought to justice. A person suspected by the security services, and then by the Home Secretary, of being a threat to security is either guilty of it or not guilty, but whichever they are, these things apply. That person is then to be served with an order, or “deemed” to be served with one; I am not quite sure what “deemed” means in these circumstances. If they are served with such an order, one effect will be to tip them off that if they come back to this country they are very likely to be prosecuted for terrorist offences. That may cause them to wish not to come back but to disappear. Allowing a British citizen who is suspected of terrorism to disappear—in fact, in certain circumstances, possibly to be provoked into disappearing—does not seem to be a particularly good idea.
As the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) said, there is then the question of somebody who has been fingered by Britain as a terror suspect subsequently being picked up by the security service of the country in which they are located. This does not
quite amount to rendition, because we are not sending them there; it is a sort of stationary rendition whereby people are left in a place where they may be in danger.