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Mr. Simon Hughes: The even more worrying point in support of the hon. Gentleman's remarks is that we are being asked to make that shift with the Home Secretary providing no evidence or making the case in the House that the current law does not adequately deal with the problems that the hon. Gentleman has described.
Mr. Simpson: That is absolutely the point that I want to make. I have waited in vain to hear any evidence that the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 fails to provide us with the abilities to tackle the issues that have been mentioned to justify the Bill. Nothing has been cited in the debate so far which has offered a shred of evidential support for that.
I have referred to causes that I support which could all fall within the terms of the Bill. However, it is also important to refer to at least one cause that I do not support. I am an opponent of this cause, but I would defend to the hilt the right of its members not to be redefined as terrorists. I am referring--and the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe) may wish to reflect on this--to anti-abortion campaigners. We all know that in the United States militant anti-abortion campaigners pose threats to people's lives and they certainly pose threats and do damage to property.
Such offences should be dealt with under the criminal law, but would I wish to see them defined as acts of terrorism? If they are defined as terrorism under the terms of the Bill, all those who offer succour and support to such religious or ideological campaigns could similarly find themselves caught within the term. They would be open to the same presumptions about the right of arrest, the right to seize documents and the right to be challenged
about whether they act as channels for the direction of money or publicity support. Even though the cause or campaign is one that I do not support, it is not right to redefine such behaviour as acts of terrorism. Offences must continue to be dealt with in the framework of the current criminal law.
Mr. John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington):
Free the Vatican One.
Mr. Simpson:
My hon. Friend says, "Free the Vatican One" and he illustrates the Bill's danger. It becomes harder to envisage which social, direct action campaigns will not be caught within its remit.
We must consider carefully the clauses that would present real difficulties to such campaigns. Clauses 14 to 17 are about the provision of assistance. They will bring solidarity groups within the Bill's terms of reference. Clause 18 sets out a duty to provide information and puts people under an obligation to act upon their "suspicions". The failure to do so can constitute an offence that may warrant up to five years in prison--and acts of solidarity can carry a sentence of up to 10 years in prison. Clause 54, which is the highlight of them all, and is about directing the activities of criminal groups, introduces an offence that can carry a lifetime sentence.
I return to the example that I gave about Genetix Snowball. It held a press conference in the House of Commons at which its press officer explained why the group was taking action to occupy fields of genetically modified crops. It is clear from the terms of clause 54 that that press officer would have been guilty of organising "at any level" the activities of Genetix Snowball. He would have fallen under the terms of the Terrorism Bill. It is crazy that its reach should extend so far and so destructively. It is a catch-all Bill that will net, if not all Members of the House, some fairly prominent Members of it.
I urge the Home Secretary to reflect on the fact that at least two of his ministerial colleagues occupied prominent positions in the campaign "Stop the 70s Tour". Many were involved in direct activities that were damaging to property and that were unambiguously ideological. They were designed to bring about the collapse of the apartheid regime. Not only would such campaigners have been caught then, but at least one of my hon. Friends is now ideally placed in the Foreign Office to conspire with others involved in international liberation struggles. Under this Bill, that may also be redefined as terrorism. This highlights the absurdity of what it could inadvertently catch within its reach.
I shall be brief in adding to the list of issues that the Bill's Committee will have to consider. The whole House should be concerned about any extension of the remit for extrajudicial activities, such as extending the rights to stop and search, to enter premises, to make arrests without warrant and to seize documents. Those are serious extensions into, and serious erosions of, civil liberties. There may be a crisis in the security services if a lasting peace breaks out in Ireland. However, we cannot offer some sort of job saving new deal scheme for the security services simply by extending the presumptions of terrorist activities into and across the whole United Kingdom.
The Bill is also in danger of presenting us with a two-track judicial system in which there is a much greater extension of reverse presumptions. Parts of the Bill make
it quite clear that it will be the arrested person's obligation to prove his or her innocence. That is a complete reversal of one of the central tenets of our judicial system. Anyone who has been down that path will know how difficult it is to prove one's innocence. The basis of any credible justice system is that it has to prove guilt; it is not for the accused to prove their innocence.
There are three challenges that must be met in Committee. First, we need to begin at the point suggested by the hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Mr. Hughes), which is to spell out exactly what is not covered within the framework of existing criminal law--particularly the Police and Criminal Evidence Act--that would justifiably be included in a terrorism Bill.
Secondly, we ought to consider a different definition of terrorism. I ask the Home Secretary to consider for a moment the definition used in the Reinsurance (Acts of Terrorism) Act 1993, which says that terrorism
Mr. Andrew Hunter (Basingstoke):
It was clear even before today's debate that the Bill had generated a great deal of interest and no little controversy. This afternoon's debate has confirmed that, but by this stage many of the salient features have been rehearsed, so I shall be brief. I want to pick up one or two points in what we have discussed.
The first is parliamentary scrutiny, which was almost the last point raised by the hon. Member for Nottingham, South (Mr. Simpson), and was also mentioned by my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe) and the hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Mr. Hughes). One of the more reassuring features of the prevention of terrorism Actand the emergency provisions Act was the level of parliamentary scrutiny to which they were subject.
As the House knows, they were reviewed thoroughly every five years; their implementation was subject to an annual independent review, and the Act had to be renewed annually after a debate and the opportunity of a vote in this place. That was deemed the appropriate way to handle emergency and temporary provisions of an exceptional nature.
Over the years, we have listened to and respected the views of a succession of Labour shadow Home Secretaries, including the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw) and the right hon. Member for Sedgefield (Mr. Blair), who viewed emergency provisions and the PTA as affronts to liberties, to be tolerated, if at all, only because of the threat and reality of Irish terrorism. I am therefore genuinely and greatly puzzled to find Labour Members, now that they are in government, willing to abandon the important mechanisms of parliamentary scrutiny of the sort of measures that they previously hesitated to support and sometimes did not support.
Successive Governments deemed that those mechanisms were necessary to scrutinise such legislation. Why cannot there be a statutory five-year review and an annual report on the implementation of this proposed permanent legislation? Why cannot there be roughly the same procedures of the annual debate and vote? I cannot understand why that should not happen. If it cannot happen, it begs the question whether it is wise to move into an era of permanent anti-terrorism legislation.
The second issue is the one on which most of the debate has been focused--a definition of terrorism, which is the inherent problem in any attempt to draft anti-terrorism legislation. I started listening to the debate with an open mind but with a general approval of the Government's approach. I had watched, as many hon. Members had, the evolution of that line of thinking, predominantly through the reports of Lord Lloyd of Berwick.
The more that the debate has unravelled, however, the more concerned I have become about the line that the Government have adopted. I should like to think that a distinction could be drawn between acts of terrorism that happen in a mature democracy, where the Government can be and are changed through the ballot box, and those that occur in a country where there is not what, for convenience, one might call a genuinely democratic Government. The various contributions to the debate have shown that such a strict distinction is hard to maintain, even untenable.
That is a supremely important issue to which we must return, first in Committee and no doubt in later stages. I fear greatly that the Bill could be used to take false steps, albeit with the best of intentions. Much thought must be given to the whole issue of defining terrorism. I suspect that ultimately one cannot reach a universal interpretation, definition and application of the concept of terrorism.
The final point that I want to raise has not been touched on greatly in this debate. It is the thorny problem of detention and the European convention on human rights. The previous Government considered in detail amending the PTA to make the judiciary responsible for authorising the extension of detention. They concluded that there was no way to do that without undermining the independence of the judiciary, especially in Northern Ireland, so the derogation that they entered after the ruling by the European Court of Human Rights on the Brogan case remained in force.
Not all of us on the Government Back Benches at the time were entirely happy with that, not least because we saw that the judiciary was increasingly assuming a review
role in other areas of the law. Although we accepted that the independence of the judiciary should not be undermined--especially, perhaps, in Northern Ireland where such matters are more sensitive--some of us thought that it could be avoided by creating a separate, independent judicial body for that purpose.
I was therefore encouraged to find in the present Government's consultation paper, "Legislation Against Terrorism", that such a body was one of the three options that they were then offering. They put forward the idea of creating an independent commission along the lines of that established by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission Act 1997. I regret that the Government have not followed that course.
"means acts of persons acting on behalf of, or in connection with, any organisation which carries out activities directed towards the overthrowing or influencing, by force or violence, of Her Majesty's government in the United Kingdom or any other government de jure or de facto."
We may want to include considerations about whether those Governments are democratically elected, but that definition returns us to the recognition that the concept of terrorism has to be, and be seen to be, a threat to the stability of the state, not to the sanctity of corporate profits.
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