My Lords, I have very little to add to the powerful speeches the Committee has already heard, but, as a supplement to what the
noble Lord, Lord Pannick, has just said, I will remind the Minister of two other facts.
First, terrorist offences are by no means all at the top end of seriousness. Schedule A1 to the Sentencing Code includes offences such as
“inviting … support for a proscribed organisation”
which may no longer be concerned with violence, as a number are not, and
“failure to disclose professional belief or suspicion about”
the commission of terrorist offences by others. Those are offences on which the clauses bite.
Secondly, even for those offences which are serious enough to merit a period of imprisonment, recidivism rates for released prisoners are—I think in most developed countries, and certainly in this one—very much lower than the recidivism rates for ordinary crime. Professor Andrew Silke calculated in 2020 that the recidivism rate was around 3% for those who had committed terrorist offences and been released between 2013 and 2019.
I hope that the question the Minister will address is why that particular category of offence merits the removal of a right enjoyed by everybody else, including people convicted of murder, rape and the other most serious crimes that our law knows.