Justice and Security Bill [Lords]

Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park Excerpts

Monday 4th March 2013 Commons Chamber

If we started like that, Lord knows where we would be now given the amendments we were facing—I cannot imagine. Some of this is unnecessary because I think a British judge would want to hold open proceedings. People will have difficulty persuading a British judge that it is sensible to go to closed proceedings. The idea that we need a whole lot of amendments that put fresh conditions on the judge, fresh questions for them to ask, and fresh, expensive and long processes to go through, is just an attempt to thwart CMPs. The Bill contains every protection because we have amended it yet again after consideration by the Joint Committee on Human Rights and the Intelligence and Security Committee.

[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

I welcome my right hon. and learned Friend’s comments. Will he tell the House whether there is a clear and understood definition of the term “national security”?

[Mr Clarke]

There is no definition, because all attempts to define it have got one into worse difficulties.

It is possible to exclude evidence from a case altogether under the existing public interest immunity procedure; the Bill does not touch that. The present PII law will be completely unaffected by the Bill, so people could still go for a PII. One is obviously being actively sought at the moment in the Litvinenko inquest, although I know that only from what I read in the press. That kind of exclusion could be claimed on the ground of damage to international relations, if the Government of some third-party state would be upset if certain evidence were to be published. That goes beyond questions of national security and into total secrecy, allowing the Minister to withdraw the whole blasted thing from the proceedings and not letting even the judge use it. That measure goes much wider. Such exclusions on wider grounds happened under the previous Government.

We are sticking to national security, however, and judges, using the completely unfettered discretion that we are now giving them, will no doubt have regard to what I say. What we have in mind are things that would cause damage to national security, by which we mean the safety of our citizens, our attempts to counter terrorism, and threats to international order among the wider public. I can assure the House that I am not in favour of excluding ministerial pigs’ ears. I am sure that the previous Government made more of them than we did, but I do not believe that that sort of thing should be put away in closed proceedings under any Government.