Counter-Terrorism Bill

I support the amendment moved by my noble friend. The conspicuously moderate way in which he has moved it indicates that he would be content with an assurance from the Minister that the factors set out in his amendment would be regarded by any reasonable Attorney-General as the kind to be taken into account in acting as guardian of the public interest and deciding whether a prosecution should go forward. We have a system in which the Attorney-General remains a politician as well as chief legal adviser to the Government in deciding whether to prosecute for terrorist offences. The Attorney-General must consider the huge breadth of the offences—some of which involve barbaric and horrendous violence and others which are essentially political in nature. While I understand perfectly the point of the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, that violence is violence in all circumstances, I nevertheless believe the need for the Attorney-General to consent to a prosecution is a vital safeguard that should be exercised not only on subjective, political grounds but also on objective ones. When the terrorist offence essentially comprises a speech crime, as in some acts of the glorification of terrorism through speaking or writing, there is a safeguard that the Attorney-General must act in accordance with the European Convention on Human Rights, including the guarantee of freedom of political expression. It is desirable to spell out objective criteria that do not fetter the discretion of the Attorney-General, which would be quite wrong in that there needs to be flexible discretion. But, as the amendment states, "““the Attorney General or the Advocate General for Northern Ireland shall have regard to””—" the factors that my noble friend Lord Goodhart has set out in paragraphs (a), (b) and (c), that does not mean that he or she is restricted to a rigid framework, only that these must be relevant factors. I suggest that my noble friend is perfectly right to point out that in law as elsewhere context is everything, and that there will be cases of the kind suggested in paragraphs (a), (b) and (c) which surely are the kind of factors to which any reasonable Attorney-General should have regard in deciding whether a prosecution should go forward. If one does not have something like this, we are in danger of having a legal system in which there are no sufficient safeguards against abuse and of the right to vindicate democratic principles internationally where one has a truly despotic and horrendous regime, provided that the individuals concerned have not been involved in acts of terrorism of a kind that paragraph (c) seeks to rule out. This is a balanced, sensible and pragmatic approach based on principle. I hope the Minister will at least say that these are the kinds of factors that the Attorney-General or the Advocate General for Northern Ireland would surely wish to take into account.