My Lords, I rise to support the amendments in this group. Section 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000 already makes it an offence if a person collects or makes a record of information of the kind likely to be useful to someone committing or preparing an act of terrorism, or possesses a document or record containing such information. Some examples will be of obvious use to terrorist activity—instructions on how to make a bomb, say—but others are not so obvious.
I walk every morning from St James’s to the House around the time of the changing of the guard. It would be useful for me to know which days the ceremony is being mounted so that I could avoid the crowds, but it would also be useful to a person preparing a terrorist attack on the soldiers taking part in the ceremony. The difference between my actions and the terrorist’s actions are simply the purpose to which that information is being put.
Subsection (4) inserts a proposed new subsection (3A) after Clause 58(3) describing a reasonable excuse defence that at the time of the person’s actions, they did not know, or had no reason to believe, that the document or record in question contained or was likely to contain information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism.
I know that the days on which the changing of the guard takes place is information likely to be useful to a person planning a terrorist attack on soldiers taking part in the ceremony, and I know that when I look at it. A reasonable excuse defence would not necessarily stop police being able to arrest and detain me for looking up when the changing of the guard takes place, even if the CPS decided that it was not in the public interest to charge me.
It may be considered to be a trivial excuse but it shows the breadth of this original offence. Indeed, the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation warned against Clause 3, saying that it risked criminalising those who view material such as bomb-making instructions,
“in disgust, shock and disapproval”.
Amendment 11, in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Rosser and Lord Kennedy of Southwark, seeks to ensure that the one click offence is mitigated by providing that it must be,
“part of a pattern of behaviour”.
While I support that amendment, for the reasons I have already given, it does not go far enough. I have therefore added my name to Amendments 12 and 13,
in the name of my noble friend Lady Hamwee. The former refers to an intention,
“to commit or encourage acts of terrorism”,
and the latter includes the following phrase:
“the person has viewed the material in a way which gives rise to a reasonable suspicion that the person is viewing that material with a view to committing a terrorist act”.
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