My Lords, I begin by echoing the words of my noble friend the Minister in paying tribute to our security services, who do an amazing job under the most difficult and, I suspect, at times, hugely frustrating circumstances. Along with the police and our Armed Forces, much of what they seek to do is often compromised, for all the right reasons, to protect our fundamental freedoms of free speech, a free press, our rule of law and our human rights—as well as protecting our lives. For terrorism, a constant is change and we need to give our agencies the tools that they need to adapt to change.
In addition, and to the best of our ability as a legislature, we need to anticipate and thereby try to future-proof measures to counter the activities of those who seek to thwart us. This is not a knee-jerk reaction to what happened in Paris last week. Some of the measures are concerned with how we confront British nationals who are highly organised and intent on acts of terrorism both within our midst and beyond our borders, including in mid-air and with the aid of the internet, and who are not necessarily concerned for their own safety.
As shadow Minister for the Home Office in 2001, I was very much involved in taking a counterterrorism Bill through your Lordships’ House. From rereading some of the debates, it is clear that we are now in a different place from 2000 and 2001, requiring some different tools and defences, particularly in relation to communications, because of the speed of change in technology.
Turning to the Bill, I want to focus my contribution on just some of the more controversial measures. It is important to say at this point that we are all making judgments about the proposals in, to some degree, a vacuum, as we do not know—nor should we—all that our intelligence services know and seek to know. What is clear is that the threat is real and, as we see on our screens here in Parliament, it is considered severe.
I declare an interest as a member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, but I must say straightaway that I do not agree with all that is contained in the report that we published yesterday. It is important to note that the committee did not invite a briefing from the intelligence services prior to publishing its report. I have been briefed by the security services, and that brief has given real context to the proposals in the Bill.
Time for consideration by the Joint Committee on Human Rights and other interested parties has been a constraint—although even on that point I must say that, although the report states that not enough time has been given for scrutiny, we have had a lot more time thus far than allowed post 9/11, when we accepted that we had to support the then Labour Government and the work of our security services. To all those who say that these measures are just about being seen to be doing something, I say that I wish that that was true, but it is not.
In addition, I want to put on record that the press release issued by Justice saying that the JCHR report is highly critical of the Bill is just wrong. In its haste to
make headlines, Justice obviously has not read the report properly. In many ways, the report supports the Bill and is thoughtful and measured in its response.
We must trust our security services to seek to do the right thing. I, for one, wholly support the measures in the Bill, with a few provisos, particularly in relation to judicial oversight to keep our Executive in check and to allow the independent reviewer the ability to review the working of the additional preventative measures to assure us that they are necessary and proportionate in all the circumstances.
I say “preventative” because that is what the measures are: making prevention a statutory duty on several levels. First, the Bill is focused on British nationals who are travelling to Syria and Iraq with the aim of carrying out terrorist activities. Some of those who we know have returned will probably have committed heinous crimes abroad and are now living in our midst. In most cases, those individuals will have been radicalised and may encourage others to follow their path.
Travel to and from Iraq and Syria can be quick and straightforward. The Bill is intended to assist our intelligence services in their task of tracking those individuals and to try to prevent them from becoming radicalised in the first place. The ability to communicate for harmful purposes via the internet through social media and other means is also addressed in the Bill, as well as the means of travel which are vulnerable to attack.
With regard to specific powers, in Part 1, Chapter 1, the power enables the police to seize and retain a person’s travel documents at a port where there is reasonable suspicion that the person is travelling outside the UK for the purpose of involvement in terrorism-related activity. The key is the ability to allow our enforcement agencies to act quickly where speed may be of the essence, always bearing in mind the speed of communications that can benefit and protect the identity and whereabouts of the individual concerned, making it much harder for the police to track them.
It is important to stress here that, although the travel documents are seized for an initial period of up to 14 days, the individual would not be detained. In addition, once consideration of further disruptive action has been completed, or 14 days after the day on which the travel document was seized, whichever comes first, the travel documents must be returned to the individual if no further action is being taken against the individual and a court has not approved a further retention period. To me, that all makes sense and is entirely reasonable, given that judicial oversight kicks in regarding any extension to the initial 14-day period.
Turning to Chapter 2 of Part 1, relating to the introduction of temporary exclusion orders, I must declare that I distance myself from the report of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, as I entirely disagree with the committee’s stance. Unlike my colleagues on the committee, I am not opposed in principle, or indeed in practice, to the removal of passports from British citizens on a temporary basis. On the contrary, I entirely support the logic of the introduction of TEOs, given the nature of the threat and the fundamental
importance of recognising the desire on the part of some of these individuals to commit acts of terrorism on our transport network.
For example, currently if our intelligence services have reason to believe that an individual may have the intent to commit an act on an aircraft outside our jurisdiction, there is nothing they can do to stop them other than talk to other authorities outside our jurisdiction. If the individual complies with the process of a TEO—