I am delighted to follow the noble and learned Baroness. The Committee has benefited greatly from her insightful comments on the background. This is a particularly murky world about which we are talking. People are in an extremely vulnerable and unfortunate position, and they may well be preyed on and further exploited by the very people I applaud the Government for trying to target.
I will speak briefly to Amendments 160 and 163 in my name. Amendment 160 is the key amendment; again, it is a concern raised by the Law Society of Scotland, which is keen to ensure that these provisions be brought to account only in exceptional circumstances. The reasoning for this—which follows very well from the discussion we have heard in this debate—is that Clause 62 excludes from the national referral mechanism persons who have committed criminal offences as well as other offences relating to terrorism. It excludes those who have claimed to be victims of terrorism in bad faith. However, it appears to divide victims into the worthy and the unworthy. Surely the Government must explain their reasoning behind this. In my view, and that of the Law Society of Scotland, no one should be disqualified from being a victim of one crime because they have been a perpetrator of another—precisely for the reasons that the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, gave us. Victims of trafficking could be criminalised for conduct relating to their trafficking. This is in breach of Article 26 of the Council of Europe trafficking convention. I cannot believe for a minute that this is the intention of the Minister or the Government in this regard.
The noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, referred to a recent court case; I do not know if it is the same one to which I will refer. A violation of Article 4 of the ECHR was recently found against the United Kingdom, in this regard, by the European Court of Human Rights in VCL and AN v the United Kingdom. For those who would like to research this further, the reference is application numbers 77587/12 and 74603/12.
I conclude with a question to the Minister. Does he not share my concern that the clause, as it stands and without reference to exceptional circumstances, introduces a high risk of a double punishment for those victims who have received convictions? Moreover, disqualifying certain victims from protection increases the prospect that they will be further exploited by organised criminal groups as they will be unable to access protection from the state.