My Lords, I will take just five minutes to move this amendment because I set out the reasoning at considerable length in Committee on 1 July, and the case that I made then still stands. I will restrict my remarks to developments since that time, notably at the United Nations. There are two main issues, and I contest the two main premises of the letter dated 13 July from the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Bridges of Headley, in response to the questions that I posed on those issues then.
However, before I turn to those issues, perhaps the Minister will respond to a separate point that I made in Committee. The commission’s normal registration procedures can take a couple of years in what it
considers to be a complicated case. They clearly do not match the requirements of a charity with a limited lifespan—in our case, of a little over one year. If ground-breaking fixed-term charities can in practice be arbitrarily ruled out for such reasons then it crosses the border between being simply an operational matter and a matter of public policy and the Government should address it. I would be grateful if the Minister will consider it before Third Reading.
I will now address the issue of the accountability of the Charity Commission, hence the reason for my proposed amendment to the present Act. My first bone of contention is the disingenuous way in which the commission went about blocking the application of the Hammarskjöld Inquiry Trust. This was purported to be—not exclusively, it said, but indispensably—on the grounds of the claimed lack of interest in the trust’s work on the part of the United Nations. This has indeed been the main bone of contention of the trustees as a body since we first made contact with the Charity Commission exactly three years ago. The Minister’s letter sidesteps the undisputed fact that the commission’s claim to that effect is now clearly seen to be plain wrong. As the Minister’s reply does not address that fact, I ask him once again whether he will take this opportunity to accept that that is so. If he wishes to deny it in the face of the pellucidly clear evidence now before us, on what grounds does he do so?
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On the related matter of whether the commission was influenced by the Government or the intelligence services, the Minister’s letter simply reports that the,
“Commission records do not indicate”,
that it had been “nobbled” in such a way. As Mandy Rice-Davies would undoubtedly have said, “Well, they wouldn’t, would they?”.
The second issue—one of global significance—is whether the British Government and our intelligence services, among those of other nations, perhaps I may add, including the United States National Security Agency, are or, even now, are not fully co-operating with the further investigations of the United Nations. In a letter to me dated 8 July, the United Nations Deputy Secretary-General encloses a memorandum introducing a report of the panel appointed by the UN General Assembly last autumn to review the evidence brought forward by the Hammarskjöld Commission. The Clerk’s office has kindly arranged for a copy of this material to be placed in the Library and noble Lords will therefore be able to judge for themselves.
The UN panel concludes, inter alia, that there is strong evidence that a second plane was involved in some way in causing the crash of the Secretary-General’s plane in Ndola in September 1961. If true, that would have been known about by the people in the control tower at Ndola airport, who probably included members of the British and Rhodesian security services. They were certainly at the airport.
The UN Secretary-General is now recommending that this autumn the General Assembly should agree to him pursuing requests for specific information made
available by the panel to certain member states and urging all member states to declassify any relevant documents, having regard to the fact that it is now more than 50 years since the event. This is not referred to in the Minister’s letter dated 13 July. However, will he comment on it and will Her Majesty’s Government now co-operate fully with the United Nations in its further investigations?