My Lords, I listened carefully to what my noble friend said, and he generated in me a little surprise; I was under the impression that he and I were singing from the same page of the hymn sheet on this one. I shall suggest to him why he and I may appear to be thinking differently and invite him to reconsider one thing that he said.
I incorporated into the amendment the view of the Joint Committee about “serious and substantial harm”. We have already debated that and the Government have a view. If their view turns out to be as we suspect it to be from this debate, I am not chasing on “serious and substantial”; I used it merely because the Joint Committee did, but I am not sure that anyone is going to get too precious about that aspect of the amendment.
As I said at the beginning, the amendment was designed to protect those who live in this country so that they would not get excluded. My noble friend chose to interpret that—perfectly correctly; I have no complaint—by citing a Russian oligarch who lived here and who had been libelled in Uzbekistan, I think he said, and the damage was in that country.
This is the point that I would like my noble friend to think about: if you take this amendment as a freestanding amendment, it allows itself to be interpreted in the way in which my noble friend interpreted it. However, if the amendment became part of the Bill then it would sit just a few lines above Clause 2, where the court has to make a decision as to whether this is the most appropriate location for a legal case to be heard. Given the example that my noble friend used, an English court would be asked to decide whether or not this was the most appropriate place for a Russian oligarch living in Kensington to take action against someone who slandered or libelled him in Uzbekistan. I yield to no one in my admiration for British justice and I am guessing that, if you put together the amendment and Clause 2, judges would say, “No; the fact that you are here allows you to come and ask us, but it doesn’t mean that this is the most appropriate place for you to do this”. When my noble friend says that he will reflect further on this debate, I invite him to look at his example against the pairing of the amendment and Clause 2, which would both be an integral part of this overall clause, and invite him to accept that Clause 2 has a mitigating effect on the amendment. If he buys the general argument that I am encouraging him to
think about, and if he says that in order to clarify this we need to tweak the new amendment to make crystal clear what we are trying to say, then I am free and easy with that; in fact, I would be delighted were he to do so.
Given that caveat, because I think that we are not very far apart and that a drafting tweak might clear that up, I thank my noble friend for his response. I note that he is nodding in thoughtfulness—I attribute nothing else to him other than thoughtfulness—and in that spirit, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.