My Lords, my name appears on some of these amendments, and I will briefly make a couple of points. I say first to my noble friend Lord Hodgson that he makes a mistake if he refers to me as heavy artillery, since I was the most inefficient gunner officer during the Suez invasion. I lost an entire water-carrying convoy, and laid a smokescreen with 100-metre gaps in it. I do not regard myself as heavy except in a physical sense. Further, the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, referred to Blackstone Chambers, which is my chambers as well. However, I make it absolutely clear than under the cab rank principle, many members of my chambers have appeared on the other side in these cases. Certainly, although I listened to Ben Jaffey, I regard the fact that I am in his in chambers as immaterial.
The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, said almost everything that needs to be said, except that the Joint Committee on Human Rights itself recommended what is now Amendment 62. In paragraph 106 of its report, it recommends that,
“the obligation to disclose sufficient material to enable effective instructions to be given to an individual’s special advocate should always apply in any proceedings in which closed material procedures are used”.
In the previous paragraph, the report quotes my noble friend Lord Carlile as saying that AF standards—that is, these disclosure standards—,
“should apply to all proceedings in any event. I can see no respectable argument against gisting in any circumstances”.
The JCHR report concludes: “We agree”.
My other point is that although I am keen on the European Human Rights Convention setting minimum international standards, in this kind of area it is the common law standards and the standards of Parliament that really set fairness in this country. I sometimes worry that reliance on Article 6 of the convention, in a system where the civil law is very strong, may actually diminish the strength of the common-law system. So I hope that the fact that these amendments have the blessing of the all-party Joint Committee on Human Rights, of the special advocates and of my noble friend Lord Carlile, the former independent reviewer of terrorist legislation, as well as of those who spoke in this debate, will carry great weight with the Government.