Terrorism (Detention and Human Rights)

The difference is a matter of degree or judgment. Despite the appalling atrocities committed during the conflict in Northern Ireland, we were not—at least not most of the time—facing an enemy for whom maximum death among the civilian population was the primary objective of every action that they took. There was a casualness and an arbitrariness about the willingness of the IRA to take life and not to apologise for it, but the scale of the threat does not turn something white into something black; it shifts the boundaries of the judgments that have to be made. We ask an enormous amount of the police in making the judgment about whether we will secure enough information and evidence on which we can base a satisfactory conviction, and about whether we are making the right intervention to protect the public from the risk. Bringing other elements into that discussion would be useful. In private session, in conversations with operational officers at Paddington Green police station and in public session, our Committee was able to consider several recent cases. Some have subsequently gone to court, but others have not yet done so, and I shall not go into them in detail. We went through the elements of the police case and found some things that they had prayed in aid—the difficulties in obtaining translation, the time for prayer, and multiple representation of the same clients by the same firm of solicitors—not proven at all. They may have been issues and difficulties for investigations, but they did not provide a sound basis for a longer detention period. Other elements—the need to arrest early, the international nature of investigations, the problems involved with computer encryption and difficulties of forensic capacity when there are many different suspects and activities—persuaded us, on the basis not of theory but of actual cases that had been investigated, that there was a convincing case for going up to 28 days. However, we did not reach the conclusion at that stage that the case had been made for going further. We said that"““the growing number of cases and the increase in suspects monitored by the police and security services make it entirely possible, and perhaps increasingly likely, that there will be cases ""that do provide that justification. We believe, therefore, that the 28 day limit may well prove inadequate in the future.””" I can say, without giving away any confidences, that the head of MI5’s recent ballpark figures on the number of conspiracies and of people involved in them is of quite a different order of magnitude from the numbers that were kicking around even at the time of our inquiry earlier this year. Things are getting more difficult and more challenging. That leads me to two conclusions. The first is that if our assessment had been done this time last year, the House could have settled on 28 days without much division and with half the pain. The second is that we need a mechanism for keeping the matter under review, partly because of its history. It is unlikely to be satisfactory if we simply wait for the Government and police to return and say, ““Well, we had another look at it, and now we want 45 days, or 60 days.”” It will take some time to undo the damage caused to the process’s credibility by the way in which the argument was first made. Even if it had been advanced in a much more satisfactory and well-argued way, it might have carried the House, but not the public. That is why we suggested—although there could be other ways to do it—that the Government use an independent committee of Privy Councillors to review the evidence. The Newton committee showed how effective that can be. The noble Lord Carlile clearly plays a vital role for all of us in analysing the issues independently. Something along those lines would be useful. We considered alternatives that would allow us not to need extended detention: using intercept evidence, lowering the charge threshold, using post-charge questioning, allowing inferences from witness silence and so on. Our Committee agreed that they would all be useful. Having considered a significant number of cases, though, we came to the conclusion that they would not resolve the problem. Even if we used intercept evidence, problems with the nature of the information and associated problems with disclosure would mean that in some cases it could not be used, even though it might be enormously important as a basis for the police investigation. That knocks on to the limited effect that lowering the threshold is likely to have. Post-charge questioning is difficult. The vast majority of serious terrorist suspects never say a word from beginning to end. They are not going to say more after a charge. We were convinced that some way down the line, people on the fringes of a conspiracy might see it as in their interests to spill what beans they have, but it would not allow much to be done about the prime suspects. As most judges have a history as criminal lawyers and most criminal lawyers advise their clients not to say anything that they do not want to say, the reality is that judges are not likely to invite juries to draw too many inferences from the silence of a defendant, whatever the House says. That is what we have found. Our view is that lots of procedural changes should be introduced—I shall not discuss them in detail—but the point of principle is that they would not really solve the problem. There would always be terrorist conspiracies that would not be prosecutable despite the changes, and the issue of detention would therefore continue to arise. Hopefully, the number of cases would be smaller, and clearly everybody will agree that the more people we can prosecute the better, but the changes would not solve the problem. I am sorry for having spoken for so long, as other hon. Members are here, but I took all the interventions that arose. I hope that the Minister will give us an indication of the Government’s current thinking on their plans for legislation this year. Perhaps he will also assure us that some lessons have been learned from the problems of last year’s Bill and that an extensive consultation period and the opportunity for pre-legislative scrutiny will be available to the House. If we can reach decisions after a lot of debate but without too much division, so much the better.