Terrorism Bill

My Lords, I do not contend that for one moment. I far prefer the amendment now suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, and I wish the Home Secretary had accepted it when he had a chance to do so. The second argument was that we need glorification in the Bill, because indirect encouragement on its own is not sufficiently ““strong and clear””—these are the words of the Home Secretary—to send out the required message. If indirect encouragement is not clear enough on its own, what is it doing in the Bill? Then it was said that if we were now to remove glorification from the Bill, that word having been included by the House of Commons, it would mean that glorification will, by implication, have been excluded from indirect incitement. To do the Home Secretary justice, he described that argument as ““technical””. It is worse than technical; it is simply scraping the barrel. Nobody has ever suggested that glorification cannot, given the facts of a particular case, amount to indirect—or even direct—incitement. Of course it can. What we object to is the use of glorification to define the parameters of the offence. That is the sticking point. Finally, the Prime Minister relied strongly on the fact that glorification is to be found in Security Council resolution 1624 of 14 September. That sounded, at first, like quite a strong point. It seemed to corroborate the Prime Minister’s view. However, it loses some of its force when one appreciates that the United Kingdom tabled that resolution. I shall quote from the speech of President Bush at the full meeting of the Security Council:"““Today we support a resolution sponsored by the United Kingdom that condemns the incitement of terrorist acts, and calls on all states to take appropriate steps to end such incitement. I want to thank the Prime Minister and his government for their hard work on this issue. The United States of America strongly supports the implementation of this resolution””." I have tried to find out from the Foreign Office who first included a reference to glorification in the draft. It does not seem likely to have been the Algerians, the Brazilians, the Chinese, the Greeks, the Japanese, or the Russians and it certainly was not the French. The French objected to glorification and substituted their own word ““apologie””. I have been told by the Foreign Office that it was not the United Kingdom delegation that first suggested the inclusion of glorification. Of course, I accept what I have been told without reservation. Maybe it was the United States, but I cannot tell; I was not allowed to know. However, it is an odd coincidence that whoever suggested glorification should have chosen the very word that was included in the Labour Government’s manifesto very shortly after the Prime Minister used the word at his press conference. These were the arguments in the House of Commons for disagreeing with Amendment No. 5, but neither the Prime Minister nor the Home Secretary dealt at all with the great objection to glorification as an offence, which is that it offends against the principle of legal certainty and, therefore, is incompatible with Article 10. They never mentioned that, yet that was the argument that was repeated over and again in this House. It was the basis on which the Joint Committee on Human Rights condemned ““glorification””. It was also the basis on which Clause 1 was questioned by Louise Arbour, the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights, in her letter of 28 November last year. These are matters of great importance which deserve a proper answer if our amendment is not to be accepted. They cannot be brushed under the carpet. Therefore, I urge the House to stand firm now and not to wait until November next year. If we do so, we are not being soft on terrorism. We are anxious only to ensure that the law makes good sense and is enforceable.