My Lords, this course is important and sensitive. I would like to give a little background to how SIAC came to be set up and involved in this way in this procedure. It happened because of a case called Chahal. Mr Chahal was a Sikh and suspected terrorist being sent back to India. Under the old three wise men procedure there was no proper judicial process to decide whether he should be sent back, so he brought a case in Strasbourg. The problem was how you reconcile justice and the needs of national security. In the Chahal case, the various NGOs that intervened mentioned that there was a Canadian process that allowed national security and justice to be reconciled by a procedure rather similar to what the House is now considering.
I then did two cases from the bad old days, one in which the then Secretary of State prevented women in the Royal Ulster Constabulary part-time reserve having
their sex discrimination cases determined in Belfast on the basis that it involved national security and that in no circumstances could his certificate be set aside. The second one involved alleged Catholic discrimination in Northern Ireland, where another Secretary of State again sought to prevent the applicants having the merits of their cases reviewed.
The SIAC procedure of 1997 was Parliament’s decision at the time to apply something like the Canadian procedure to enable national security and justice to be properly weighed. I have one experience of SIAC from the distant past, when I represented a group of suspected terrorists, who later won their case—not through me—in Luxembourg. My experience then was very unhappy. I and they did not consider that the way it was dealt with by SIAC felt fair. But that was a long time ago and I am sure that lessons were learnt a long time ago. For my part, we are now concerned with not the controversial matters that plagued the House for so long when considering the Justice and Security Bill, but a perfectly sensible grafting on to the existing SIAC procedure of matters that clearly belong within SIAC under those procedures and nowhere else.
I recognise the compromises that are struck in these rules, one of which is where the Home Secretary—the Minister—decides to object to the disclosure of information to the claimant. My understanding is that there can then be a special advocate procedure to deal with that. That is a compromise that I reluctantly accept has to apply in this context. I hope, having said all that, that it provides a little more context to what we are talking about. For my part, I support the Motion before the Committee.