My Lords, it has been helpful to go through the Bill as the result of the amendments, trying to tease out as much as possible about the workings of the system. Certainly a good many questions
have been raised; I will try to respond to as many of them as possible. As regards those that I do not get round to responding to, I will read the Official Report and write in the correct way and then we can return to it on Report should the noble Baroness wish to do that.
It is worth making a few contextual comments. Upwards of 600 people from this country have travelled to the Middle East. Everybody knows that; there is a certain flinching and the reaction is, “Don’t say that again”. However, if that was not the nature of the threat, we would not be bringing forward this measure. About half of those people have returned to the UK. Some might say that that poses quite a risk. We know—it is not an unreasonable thought—that a number of terrorist organisations would seek to advance their warped and perverted cause by seeking to bring down an airliner or blow it up; that is not manufactured but is a real threat to us. Therefore, when the authorities have produced sufficient evidence for a reasonable belief that someone has been involved in terrorist activities, and that that has been tested through a court, if we simply said that they should be able to board a flight on the way home back to the UK, some might say that we were failing in our duty of care to the people in the country and to those on the airliner. As my noble friend Lady Warsi rightly said, none of us would like to think about our children, let alone us, travelling on a flight that may contain people who have been engaged in that activity.
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That is the context for this measure. Our response is not to say that somebody is excluded for good or that they are not allowed to come back. In many ways, we want them to come back and we want them to be reintegrated in society. We also want them to be part of the effort, in which we are all involved—my noble friend Lady Warsi referred to this, and she is involved more than most—to deter other people from going out in a similar way to engage in terrorist activities.
For all those reasons, we are saying that those people are not allowed to board an aircraft or the Eurostar because their passport, with judicial supervision, will have been invalidated. Therefore, they do not have a passport. That is not the same as being stateless. We went through that with the noble Lord, Lord Harris, at Second Reading. They are still British citizens and still our responsibility. The passport is not the same as citizenship; it is the property of the issuing authorities. We are saying that the passport and their travel documents are invalid, so they need to seek a permit to return—we are talking about the terms of that permit. Effectively, that is what I am being asked about.
I apologise for that lengthy introduction but, without the context, it does look odd and strange that we are going down this route. I can understand why the noble Lord, Lord Judd, who has huge experience in the international arena, would be concerned about that. However, I shall now turn to some of the specific points that have been raised.