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Mr. Kirkhope: I have listened with great interest to the comments in this debate of the hon. Member for Cardiff, South and Penarth (Mr. Michael), as has my hon.
Friend the Member for Eastbourne (Mr. Waterson). My hon. Friend will no doubt wish to reply. The Government have been very concerned about the comments made by my hon. Friend--who is promoting the Bill--by the hon. Gentleman and by the hon. Member for Swansea, East (Mr. Anderson). The Bill deals with a difficult issue. In Committee, we had a very full debate on the necessity of a provision requiring the Attorney-General's consent for prosecution under the legislation.
I do not believe that it is necessary that every case brought for prosecution under the legislation must be considered by the Attorney-General, simply to ensure that no highly sensitive cases escape his notice. Nevertheless, I have spoken to the Attorney-General, and he has considered, with the Director of Public Prosecutions, the issue very carefully. I am able to inform the House that, on the authority of the Attorney-General, the Director of Public Prosecutions proposes to issue a standing instruction which will stipulate the level at which all cases under this legislation must be considered. It will be supplemented by a further requirement that any such case which gives rise to issues of public policy touching on a sensitive area, such as international relations, shall be drawn to the attention of the director, with a clear view to consultation between the director and the Attorney-General.
Consultation between the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Attorney-General in relation to sensitive cases is an integral part of the superintendence relationship provided for under the Prosecution of Offences Act 1985, to which we referred in Committee. The Director of Public Prosecutions for Northern Ireland would put in place similar arrangements.
Those proposals perhaps do not quite go to the lengths of the amendments tabled by the hon. Member for Cardiff, South and Penarth and other hon. Members, but I think that they are a very positive set of proposals and have been promptly made.
Mr. Michael:
I am grateful to the Minister for his comments. He is making it clear that he listened to what was said in Committee. However, I should like to be clear on his proposals. He has mentioned and outlined a mechanism. Will the strength of his proposals be based on a requirement rather than on advice, and will he advise
Mr. Kirkhope:
As I think we have been reminded several times today, there has been a comparatively short time between the stages in the Bill's passage. We have yet to work out the precise and most practical mechanisms. However, I think that my remarks have made it fairly clear which route we think we can and should follow. No doubt the hon. Gentleman and my hon. Friend the Member for Eastbourne thought that I would come empty handed today, but I have not. I believe that our proposals can well be put into practice in a manner that will effectively deal with some of the concerns that have been expressed. I know that hon. Members have said in this debate that Ministers give assurances which are as nothing as time goes on. I do not give assurances lightly, and I will personally ensure that the matters progress--hopefully to satisfy hon. Members.
Mr. Galloway:
One is grateful for small mercies and that sounds, on the face of it, like a small mercy, but, as even the Minister has acknowledged, the lack of clarity--the necessary lack of clarity given the lateness of the hour of the statement being lobbed into the debate--again highlights what I said earlier: the unseemly haste with which the Bill is being rushed through means that mistakes might be made. The small mercies being thrown on the table may or may not be as they appear, and may or may not have the quality to which the Minister attests. I have no doubt that the matter will be fully tested in another place.
I am not sure whether the elevation of the decision to prosecute to ministerial level--if that is what the Minister was saying; it is certainly what my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, South and Penarth is proposing in the amendment--is a good or a bad thing. The position of Attorney-General is a political appointment. The Attorney-General is a member of the Cabinet and of a political party. He is a partisan political figure, not some august God-like legal figure far removed from down and dirty politicians like us. As we have seen in recent years, Attorney-Generals are often taken down dark alleyways by their political colleagues--alleyways which they perhaps wish they had not gone down and which lead to all sorts of nasty accidents that later leap up and bite them. I am therefore worried that the proposed move might not necessarily be a good thing. Like a Government, an Attorney-General is here today and gone tomorrow. That means that the tests applied are necessarily subjective and ever changing.
Some years ago, I had the privilege to go to Saudi Arabia as part of a delegation from the House. I was with a group of people who turned out to be very distinguished--myself excepted of course. On the delegation was the now Government Chief Whip. He then held no position, although I was able to see his sagacity long before the Prime Minister did.
The delegation was very ably led by Lord Pym, the former Foreign Secretary. I forget which one it was, but there had been a recent squall in British-Saudi relations. The al-Yamamah II mega arms deal was in the pipeline, and billions of pounds of work and profits and many jobs were at stake, so it was thought that the ruffled feathers of the Saudi Arabian Government had to be smoothed.
As those who were in the House with him will recall, Lord Pym is an Englishman of a certain type. He is an old-school gentleman, a real gent. All the diplomatic skills that he had acquired over the years were put to use by that delegation when we met all the luminaries of the Saudi Arabian state. Each and every one of those luminaries made the same complaint to Lord Pym, namely about media misrepresentation, as they put it, of Saudi policy and the Saudi legal system. The gripe that was current at the time was the decision to broadcast in this country the documentary "Death of a Princess", which sensationalised some of the horrors of the Saudi legal system.
Before the first meeting, Lord Pym briefed us in the following terms--I am paraphrasing but I think accurately--"We are here to soft-soap but we can never apologise." With great aplomb, sophistication and savoir faire, Lord Pym soft-soaped but did not apologise. Whenever he was asked why Britain did not prosecute this or that person for this or that slight against Saudi Arabia, he replied--it seemed to be a great strength to him--that politicians had nothing to do with such decisions. He said that our legal system was separate from the Executive and that politicians did not decide who should be prosecuted or not. I was then a young Member of Parliament and it seemed to me a great strength--probably also a good excuse--that Lord Pym could say that then. To some extent, the Government recently said the same thing during the al-Masari period. They were able to say that al-Masari was not committing any breaches of British law and although they despised and detested him, they could not invent reasons to prosecute him.
We shall no longer have that excuse if we accept the amendment or what appears to be a concession from the Minister. If we accept the amendment and the apparent concession, the decision about which cases to proceed with will be a political decision made with the state's interest, as it is perceived at a particular time, in mind. It will therefore have less to do with justice and more to do with politics; it will be more subjective than objective. It will not be a test of whether an offence has been committed but of whether the Attorney-General of the day thinks that an offence should be proceeded against. That will lead us down some tortuous byways because Governments, and even policies within Governments, change. I repeat the example that I cited earlier.
There was time when Saddam Hussein's Government were most valued customers and warmly treated. If they were not allies, they were very special customers. Ministers without number made trips without number to sit on his sofa and try to sell him military hardware. British business delegations were constantly going over there while people like me were demonstrating outside the embassy in London on the side of the victims of the Saddam dictatorship.
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