Terrorism (Detention and Human Rights)

I do not want to put too many words into the mouths of my Committee members, who did not necessarily address the issues explicitly, so I shall put forward my view. We probably need to be sufficiently imaginative to understand how some of the strengths of the continental systems can be adapted to our legal traditions. I do not propose a full panoply of investigating judges and all the rest of it, but it would be valuable to consider whether there is a category of judge that would be capable of taking an independent legal view on some operational decisions. We can construct such processes in our tradition. The moves, highlighted in the Joint Committee’s report, towards the development of a specialist section of the Crown Prosecution Service, concentrating on attempting to ensure that we secure terrorist convictions, begin to point us in that direction. It would not be wholesale importation of a system through the channel tunnel, but learning lessons and asking, ““How do we do this in a British manner?””