Justice and Security (Northern Ireland) Bill

The House has heard the Minister and I do not want to provoke him into answering much of what I am going to say, but I want to make two or three sensible and serious remarks. First, the likelihood of judicial review happening will, I suspect, be low, particularly if many of the hopes built up over recent months are carried forward, but it remains an important issue. The Government tend to operate to a degree by precedent and, if this goes unchallenged and unremarked, I do not believe that the House will have done its duty. I am glad that some hon. Members have put questions to the Minister and that he has responded to them. Secondly, it may be possible to think of a parallel, albeit not a direct parallel. I remember being involved in the case of a senior officer of the Metropolitan police who had warrants issued by judges and certificates signed by Ministers saying that a particular person was a very serious threat to national security, providing reasons to grant those warrants. It turned out, however, that the information given to Ministers was completely wrong. Without opening all that up again, I hope that there will be some system whereby afterwards—whether it be immediately afterwards or after the trial or perhaps even some years after that—the information becomes open to review. If and when either judges or Ministers issuing certificates realise that they should not have done so, I hope that they will find some way of saying so. Finding out what happens at the time is one issue, but trying to pick up the picture later is another. There needs to be some invigilation of the uses of the certificate to exclude review. I happen to believe that there are too many applications for judicial review for too many cases, but there are certainly times when they are important. There are the examples of Clive Stafford Smith’s work on Guantanamo Bay, which has embarrassed other American lawyers, including military defence lawyers; and the work of Gareth Peirce in this country, opening up to judicial supervision cases that would otherwise have gone unchallenged. I am sure that the Minister would accept that we have a responsibility to ensure that powers are used properly and limited wherever possible.