I shall speak to Amendment 60, which is in this group. It is simply a question of elementary procedural fairness. It is really no more than that, and no less than that. It may not be wise to tell an individual before he is designated that he is going to be designated because, obviously, if that were to happen the designation would come too late and the assets would be hidden or dissipated, but procedural fairness is a basic principle of the common law. If you are arrested, you must be informed of the reasons for your arrest. If you are made subject to sanctions of the kind envisaged in this Bill, they affect your livelihood and your ability to support your family and to live an ordinary life so that you are, in the words of my noble and learned friend
Lord Hope at Second Reading, in effect a prisoner in your own home. If you are in any way going to be subjected to the coercive powers of the state, you should be told why those coercive powers are being exercised against you and they should be justified. This Bill is bung full of massive coercive powers. In these circumstances, the amendment that my noble friend Lord Pannick and I propose is absolutely self-evident, but without it, or without some concession to this group of amendments, we will end up with having done some insidious damage to an essential constitutional principle, and we should not be doing it. I highlight paragraph 29 of the Constitution Committee’s report, but I do not suppose noble Lords want me to read it.