Justice and Security Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Owen and Baroness Kennedy of Shaws

Tuesday 26th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Owen]

My Lords, as a former Minister with responsibility for MI6 I realise that although it has a need to have and an interest in having its views expressed—and that was done very well by the noble Baroness, Lady Ramsay—there is also a prior consideration, and that is to write on to the face of the Bill that we have almost unanimously agreed that this closed procedure can be done only in a tiny minority of cases, or, as other spokesmen have said, only as a wholly exceptional device. I can see no objection whatever to the wording of the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, and I profoundly hope that it is agreed to.

The other amendment, proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, raises very serious questions about whether we would see this new procedure, which I now think is necessary, in operation. I agree with everything that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd, said about that and I do not need to repeat his arguments. I think that some would regard the amendment as a blocking mechanism, although I am sure that it was not proposed in that way; I am sure that it was proposed as a double safeguard. However, it would not deal with the issue that, above all, has concerned me: how you protect source material, particularly if it comes through the intelligence of another country. We cannot imagine that a totally rational debate will always take place in a law court. This is an issue of whether you are supplied with that information. If there are profound doubts about the procedures—right or wrong—and if they are held by countries which have been our intelligence partners over many decades and whose information has sometimes saved a considerable number of lives in this country, we have to take account of how they see that procedure. Were the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, to be passed, we might find that other countries would not see the procedure as safe. I would therefore stick to the Government’s amendment and their wording and not go along with the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws]

My Lords, I support Amendments 6A and 6B. I think that there is agreement in the House that CMP should be used only in the most exceptional circumstances and that it so radically departs from one of the most fundamental of our common law principles that it is essential that its use is kept to a minimum.

I endorse what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown, said about the process that happens in a court. All this sometimes seems arcane or obscure to those who are not lawyers and it is easier to pin it down by having examples. Those of us who practise in the courts and often deal with security matters know that the process described by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown—where a judge will consider whether you can redact documents and take out references or anything else that might in any way disclose the identity of an informant—takes place in these cases and has done over the years. There is the business of someone giving evidence with their identity never being disclosed, or giving it from behind a screen, and there are other ways of doing it using new technology. There are many mechanisms, quite different from the PII process, which can protect the things that the security services are sensitive to, and it can be done with agreement while retaining the sense of as much openness as possible.

My sense of what the House wants here is for the closed material procedure of barring the defendant and their lawyers from the court and from hearing the evidence—which is fundamentally unfair and flies in the face of the idea of a fair trial—to happen in the most exceptional circumstances. It therefore seems extraordinary that there should be resistance to the notion that the Bill should state that such a process should be used only as a last resort. The argument made for not doing so is that it would be time-consuming for the Secretary of State—because the Secretary of State, even in this minute number of cases, would have to look through the papers and acquaint him or herself with the detail—as well as for the court. As your Lordships have heard from others who, like me, have participated in proceedings of this kind, one would expect a Secretary of State or a judge in a case of this kind to consider with care the nature of the evidence and whether it was possible to keep it as open as possible. That is what we would expect, and it is certainly what I would expect of a Minister who was exercising authority. Otherwise we would ask, “If the Minister does not want to examine the evidence that is being kept secret, who is exercising the authority? Is it the Minister or is it the security services?”. We really have to be very careful here. I remind the House of what happened in Matrix Churchill, where we understood that there was just a signing-off of requests by the security services, which was of great discredit to government at the time. I would warn against what this procedure will do to confidence in government, confidence in the security services and confidence in our judicial processes.