My Lords, my noble and learned friend Lord Garnier has given us a taste of things to come. I have had the privilege of knowing him since we were adolescents, so it is a particular pleasure for me to see him in his place today—yes, lawyers were children once.
It is a matter for celebration that so many of our current politicians are the sons and daughters of immigrants and that people come into politics from all sorts of backgrounds. My noble and learned friend, on the other hand, comes from a family with a long tradition of public service, and this country is richer for that tradition. He has managed to combine a quarter of a century as a Member of Parliament with a successful practice at the Bar, where he has been for some time one of the leaders in the field of defamation and media law. He was also instrumental in the introduction of deferred prosecution agreements to the prosecutorial armoury; a valuable weapon against corporate economic crime. Further, he has sat for some time as a recorder of the Crown Court.
Despite all these achievements, and a term as Solicitor-General, my noble and learned friend has a quality that is all too rare in barristers: modesty. I am confident that his contributions to debates in your Lordships’ House will be relevant and brief, and that, unlike some of us, he will not consider it necessary to give the House the benefit of his views on every subject. My noble and learned friend Lord Gamier is a most welcome addition to your Lordships’ House.
I now turn to the Bill. The scale of the terrorist threat to this country can hardly be overstated, whether from extremists claiming allegiance to the Muslim faith or from state-sponsored terrorism as we witnessed in Salisbury. We should pay tribute to the contribution that the police and the security services make to keep us as safe as they can in increasingly challenging circumstances.
One fact that I took away from the Home Secretary’s recent speech in Birmingham was that an estimated 800,000 people who currently live in this country do not speak English. I am not of course suggesting for a moment that if you do not speak English you are likely to be a terrorist. However, it is a considerable challenge for our security services simply to understand what is going on in communities where English is not spoken or spoken much, and where there is little or no loyalty to British values or traditions.
In its report on the Bill, the Joint Committee on Human Rights was critical of it in a number of respects, identifying various potential violations of human rights. Of course, that is the remit of the committee, of which I was once a member, and I do not for a moment impugn the integrity of the process, as it was suggested the security Minister did in the other place. However, I wish us to bear in mind that, in this country, there was a long-established respect for free speech before Article 10 of the European Convention became part of our law through the medium of the Human Rights Act in 1996. If we must look at issues through the prism of the Human Rights Act, can we bear in mind Article 2, the right to life, and Article 8, the right to a family life, in the context of those affected by terrorism? The first
duty of a Government is to keep their subjects safe. To do so, there must sometimes be restrictions on individual rights.
The primacy of individual rights is such that loyalty to one’s country seems in some quarters to be regarded as something of an option, coming below loyalty to one’s religion or even one’s football team. Many would agree with EM Forster, who wrote in 1938 that he hoped, given the choice, that he would have the guts to betray his country rather than his friends. But if you choose to live in this country, is it so unreasonable to expect you to show some loyalty to it and not to give assistance to our enemies?
The word “treason”, mentioned by my noble friend Lord King, has a dated feel about it, but may I also commend the recent Policy Exchange publication, Aiding the Enemy: How and Why to Restore the Law of Treason? Its authors include two Members of Parliament, one Labour and one Conservative, and it has a foreword by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge. It provides a compelling case for the return to the statute book of a modern law of treason—the 1351 statute is plainly no longer fit for purpose.
The new offence of entering or remaining in a designated area may help but clearly needs further scrutiny. For British subjects who leave this country to serve with ISIS or the Taliban, for example, is a maximum sentence of 10 years really enough? What about Anjem Choudary, sentenced to five and a half years in prison and due out this month? Even though this Bill promises, rightly, to end in certain circumstances automatic release on serving half a sentence, that is too late for Choudary and others. Does the current statutory framework adequately capture the gravity of being a recruiting sergeant for ISIS at a time when it is engaged in combat with our forces and actively trying to attack the United Kingdom? The time may well have come to update the law on treason as Australia, Canada and New Zealand have done.
As the noble Lord, Lord Janvrin, pointed out, radicalisation in prison is a real threat. Government policy is to imprison those who pose a threat to national security in separate units to minimise the risk of other prisoners being radicalised. Very few have in fact been separated, apparently because of apprehension in the Prison Service about human rights litigation. Perhaps the Minister would care to comment on that.
This Bill deserves careful scrutiny, and it is clear that there is the expertise in this House to do just that. There are certainly improvements that can be made. For example, the Law Society has made some powerful points about the erosion of legal professional privilege at border interceptions, referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Rosser. For my part, I need convincing that all those restrictions are currently justified. But, for the most part, I welcome the Bill and hope that it receives support across the House.
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