My Lords, I apologise for detaining the House rather late on a quite different subject from that which we have been discussing in the past hour or so. Let me first explain why I am moving Amendment 89, to add a new section to the Foreign Enlistment Act 1870 to make it an offence to participate as a combatant in armed conflict against a foreign state without the licence of Her Majesty. My purpose in doing so is to defend the realm, which is the first duty of any British Government.
As the world recovers from six years of financial crisis, the determination of the expanding Islamic jihadist factions to wage terrorism in the West is a growing threat to the stability and future of our citizens. The growth of Islamist jihad is now as dramatic as anything that has been seen since those decades of expansion that followed the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 AD. This now includes persecution of Christians in many Muslim countries, particularly Pakistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Egypt and now Syria, which was once an oasis of religious tolerance. It is reminiscent of Stalin’s description to Beria of the Bolsheviks as,
“a sort of military-religious order”.
The brutal ferocity, using a combination of guerrilla warfare and terrorism, with which jihad is being pursued by a relatively small number of fanatical Islamists is hard to counter. The Islamist challenge is the one issue on which the five permanent members of the UN Security Council share a common interest.
Components of the disorder that has followed the Arab spring include: a desire for freedom; an aspiration for better living standards; hope for democracy; tribal conflicts; revenge on oppressors; incitement to new human rights abuses and other activities—all of which are overlaid with the historical and tragic hatreds between Sunni and Shia, which are reflected both nationally and regionally. Both Sunnis, led by Saudi Arabia, and Shias, led by Iran, struggle for hegemony. Over that hovers the shadow of the Islamist Wahhabi agenda, of which the new generation al-Qaeda is the guardian and choreographer for a world-scale jihad to install Sharia law under a Sunni caliphate in as many countries as possible.
In Libya, the operation of various militant groups has now raised the risk to a level where international construction companies are starting to withdraw their
personnel from major development programmes. In Iraq, the ferocity of the Sunni backlash against the Shia majority has led to rapid escalation of sectarian terrorism with a massive death rate. With the establishment of al-Qaeda-dominated Islamist factions in Yemen, the Government are struggling to maintain control over the country.
It is now clear that American and European policy towards Syria has been a disaster. Western moral support with implied crucial military backing for the rebellion against Bashar Assad sustained and expanded the struggle to a point where the brutality of Assad’s resistance outraged international opinion. Then in August, plans for the imminent military action by the US, Britain and France to achieve regime change in Damascus were aborted after the British participation was voted down by Parliament. By then, the Islamists had taken control of the rebel forces and any hope of democracy in Syria was replaced by the wholly unacceptable prospect of an al-Qaeda-dominated Islamist state perhaps even worse than the present Government.
The Islamist influence is spreading rapidly inside Africa. In Nigeria, a particularly vicious form of hostage-taking terrorism by al-Qaeda is prominent. In Mali, the French have intervened against al-Qaeda. Similar intervention by French forces is taking place in the Central African Republic. In Somalia, 6,000 mulitnational Sunni militants of al-Shabaab, another al-Qaeda offshoot, are fighting 17,000 African Union troops, who are attempting to defend a weak Somali Government. In predominantly Christian Kenya, al-Shabaab is expanding its attacks, for example with the September attack on the Nairobi shopping mall.
During 2013, more British citizens were killed by terrorism overseas than in the previous seven years combined. In Pakistan there is almost total anarchy, with the army appearing ambivalent about the fight against Islamist extremists. A real indicator of the hold that the Taliban fundamentalists have over Pakistani thinking is the way in which the schoolgirl Malala, who in December 2012 was shot in the head by the Taliban for demanding education for girls, has now been demonised in certain parts of Pakistan.
All that is the backdrop to my amendment, so let me now come to the specific risks. In this, I have been guided by the evidence given on 7 November 2013 in a rare public meeting of the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament by the director of GCHQ, Sir Iain Lobban, the director-general of the Security Service—MI5—Mr Andrew Parker, and the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service—MI6—Sir John Sawers. They outlined some aspects of the direct threat to this country from British jihadists who go to fight overseas.
The head of MI6 said:
“The threat comes from those countries which are either secretive states, where there is ungoverned territory where terrorists can operate … the Middle East, South Asia, Africa”.
If there is a terrorist there, he said,
“it is important for our security, in the UK, that an eye is kept on him, that he is surveilled, that he is monitored. Maybe he needs to be detained and arrested at some point”.
The head of MI5 said:
“A very important strand of the threat we face is the way in which there is interaction between people who live in this country, who sympathise with or support the Al-Qaeda ideology and they
travel to areas where they meet these Al-Qaeda groupings, either Al-Qaeda itself in South Asia or some of these other groupings … they meet British citizens who are willing to engage in terrorism and they task them to do so, back at home where they have a higher impact in this country”.
He went on to say that the threat,
“has grown recently and is growing … because of Syria. Syria has become a very attractive place for people to go for that reason”.
He referred to:
“Those who support or sympathise with the Al-Qaeda … message … We have seen low hundreds now of people from this country go to Syria for periods and come back, some large numbers still there, and get involved in fighting”.
He went on to say,
“the vast majority of the plots come from people who live here. There are several thousand individuals in this country who I would describe as supporting violent”,
terrorism or being “engaged in it”. I hope that I may have convinced your Lordships of the threat.
My amendment, which builds on earlier legislation, discriminates against no one. It merely means that any British passport holder who takes part in armed conflict as a combatant against a foreign state with which we are not at war, or who induces any other British citizen to do so, will be subject to penalty unless he has informed the Foreign Secretary before doing so. There could be three penalties according to my amendment: a fine or imprisonment; the forfeiture of a British passport; or the deprivation of citizenship. It would send a clear message to those considering taking part in armed jihad. It would necessitate HM Passport Office being aware of the details of other passports that British passport holders have. This is something that I have urged for a long time, as part of the better methods of defending our national borders, and I hope that my noble friend the Minister will at least be able to tell me that that is now in place.
I should perhaps add that there are already substantial powers to deal with terrorism. Indeed the Supreme Court, in R v Gul in 2013, emphasised that while there is no internationally agreed definition of terrorism in international law, in British law terrorism is very widely defined. My amendment is therefore neither needed nor intended to deal with terrorism per se; it is intended to control actions which, according to the heads of our intelligence services, could lead to people becoming terrorists. It is therefore a preventative measure, and one with sufficient sanction to deter those who might be led into terrorism by military adventure overseas.
Finally, it is because the jihadist threat is a new threat that I believe this is necessary. There was in days past a tradition of British citizens going to fight in other people’s battles with which they identify—the Spanish civil war is an obvious example—but this is quite different. In any case, the opportunity as well as the need, in effect, to get consent from HMG before becoming an overseas combatant, would ensure that no one need fear victimisation for their political or religious convictions. I believe I would have the support of the great majority of the British people in raising this issue today. I beg to move.
9.45 pm