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The Lord Bishop of Portsmouth: My Lords, I would not say that the Church of England or the Anglican Church is in retreat. What I said earlier was carefully balanced in a productive way. If we have this law for religious hatred, our specific protection needs to be
 
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unravelled. If we do not pass this law, let us leave the blasphemy law to gather dust generously, if that is the mind of the House.

Baroness Flather: My Lords, gather dust it certainly will, or we can lose it—I do not think that it will matter at all. I do not want to see separate schools in this country. I do not want to see women treated worse than women in the mainstream. I want this country to remain the country I came to, and to improve: to be more cohesive and to have a central ethos that binds us all to which we owe our allegiance.

Lord Lloyd of Berwick: My Lords, it is a great privilege to follow the marvellous speech of the noble Baroness. I am afraid that what I have to say will be regarded as a dull interlude in a fascinating debate.

When the Bill was going through the House of Commons, an amendment was tabled by Andrew Mitchell to repeal Section 17 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, commonly known as RIPA. That is the section that prohibits the use of intercept material in legal proceedings. In the short time that Andrew Mitchell was allowed—I may say to the noble Baroness, Lady Ramsay, whom I am not sure is in her place, that he is not a lawyer, but he seemed to show a mastery of the subject of interception—he made a very convincing case.

I shall be tabling a similar amendment in Committee, as I did five years ago when RIPA was being enacted. I will say a word or two about why that amendment should be agreed to. At the outset, I wish to pay the warmest possible tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Ramsay, from whom I learnt all that I ever knew about the sophisticated techniques employed in interception. She was a marvellous teacher and I must have proved a slow-witted pupil: probably even more slow-witted when she sees the terms of my proposed amendment.

The noble Baroness made an important point this afternoon and a few days ago that interception is about more than telephone tapping, of which we have all heard. It is always important to remember that. On 26 January, as the Bill was going through the House of Commons, the Government published a Written Statement on interception, for which we had all been waiting a long time. I shall return to it in a moment.

I remind the House—I am sure the House has not forgotten—that we are the only country in the world apart from Ireland that does not use intercept material to convict serious criminals. When I was preparing my report on terrorism in 1995 I visited the United States of America, Canada, France and Germany and talked to the intelligence agencies in all those countries. They were astonished that we did not use intercept for evidential purposes: for convicting as well as catching criminals.

Of course it would not make a difference in every case, but it would make a difference in perhaps a large number of cases and in some cases it would prove crucial. In Australia it has been found that when defendants are faced with the transcript of an incriminating telephone
 
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conversation they are more likely than not to plead guilty straight away. Why cannot we use the same technique here?

I will not dwell on the many absurdities that arise in practice in the law as it now stands, but I can give just one example. Suppose there are two drug dealers engaged in a telephone conversation in England. If that conversation is intercepted in Holland—and these were the facts of a case that reached the House of Lords not very long ago—that intercept could be given in evidence in English proceedings to convict one, other or both of the defendants; but not if that conversation had been intercepted in England. That seems to me to be a crazy result that we have reached.

I come back to the Written Statement. The first thing to notice about it is that the review team could not reach an agreed conclusion, which might explain why it took so long. It was left instead to the Ministers to make the decision. It is important that it did find that evidential use of intercept material would be "likely" to convict some serious criminals who would not otherwise be convicted. Surely, that tilts the balance in favour of admitting the evidence, unless there are very strong evidence the other way.

What are those arguments? The report refers to the unique relationship that exists between the intelligence agencies and the police. It hints that that relationship might be prejudiced, and the noble Baroness, Lady Ramsay, made the same point earlier this afternoon. I know that the relationship is indeed very close, but is it unique? In Australia, intercept material is used both for evidential and intelligence purposes, and there has been no difficulty.

Then it is said that sophisticated techniques now in use might be compromised. That is an important point, which weighed heavily with the noble Baroness, Lady Ramsay, as was clear from her speech. There is now a well established procedure in the courts—I wish I could assure the noble Baroness, Lady Ramsay, of this—whereby such techniques would be protected from the public gaze. It is known as the public interest immunity certificate. It was explained by the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, a day or so ago in the debate on the Prevention of Terrorism Act, and it is working well currently in the courts. The sophisticated techniques of which the noble Baroness spoke would not be at risk, and the more ordinary techniques of telephone tapping could be used to convict criminals.

I have one last point. As I said, I shall be tabling an amendment in Committee. I wonder whether it would be possible for me to see the report before the Committee stage. I am aware that the report is classified, but I wrote to the Home Secretary on 4 February asking whether I might, as a former chairman of the Security Commission, see the report. I wrote again on 16 February, pointing out that I still have the security safe in which my top secret documents used to be kept. I am afraid to say that I have not yet had a reply, although I do not complain about that, because the Home Secretary has clearly had other things on his mind in recent days. I wonder whether it might be possible for me
 
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together with the noble Baroness, Lady Ramsay, to be allowed to see the report. It may be that if we did, we might be able to resolve some of our differences.

Lord Lester of Herne Hill: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble and learned Lord. Before he concludes, I am sure that he is aware that in other countries, such as Germany, this problem is well catered for by specially vetted judges who sit in camera and who do not have to show sensitive material at all to the accused or his lawyers. Could not those rather stringent conditions be imposed as the quid pro quo for ensuring that the judge sees everything?

Lord Lloyd of Berwick: My Lords, I am not sure that I was aware of that, but Germany was certainly one of the countries that I visited some 10 years ago, and there seemed to be no difficulty then.

Baroness Whitaker: My Lords, I particularly welcome Clause 92 of this excellent Bill, which, in enabling mutual assistance, does away with what I hope is the last obstacle to the UK's ratification of the UN Conventions against Transnational Organised Crime and against Corruption. I remind your Lordships of my interest in Transparency International. Can my noble friend assure the House that the UK will now be able to ratify the Convention against Corruption? It is important that a number of OECD countries are among the first 30 countries to ratify, as these will determine the implementation systems; none of the 19 which have ratified so far is from the OECD. We shall lose out if there is not a balance and, also, surely the UK should be seen among the leaders in combating international corruption.

To turn to SOCA, which is a big step forward, I have one concern; that likely to focus on drugs and people trafficking, as it should, and created as it is from the absorption of other elements, it may take the lion's share of precisely those skills and resources which are used on economic and financial crimes. Corruption and other economic and financial crimes tend to be left out of policing targets, because the view persists that there are no victims. The report of the Africa Commission testifies otherwise, to the millions of victims among the poor of the world, and to our obligation to reduce this scourge of their economic growth and democracy, as well as of our reputation.

We lack a single, well resourced body, charged with investigating and prosecuting these crimes. The Serious Fraud Office has too few resources to be able to handle other than very serious or high-profile cases. So, I ask my noble friend, what will be the consequences for the SFO and local forces of this reorganisation? Will the SFO have less recourse to the criminal intelligence work at present undertaken by NCIS, or the covert policing undertaken by the NCS, after these have been absorbed into SOCA? I also hope that my noble friend will consider extending the list of offences to which the investigatory powers of the DPP will apply to include corruption offences.
 
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I want to welcome the new offence of stirring up hatred against people because of their religion. Much eloquence has been deployed to say that this provision harms freedom of speech. I fear I may not be let back into Hampstead tonight, but I do think that my friends are confusing two things. We need to ensure that the wording is tight enough to allow books, plays, films, programmes to attack, challenge, ridicule and make jokes about beliefs safely. The Bill needs some work on that. To send that signal clearly, I agree with all those who say that it would now be right to do away with the offence of blasphemy.

But we should not forget that it is a common occurrence in this country for people to experience the incitement of hatred because of their religion or belief. Very telling evidence from your Lordships' Committee on Religious Offences of actual incidents, and the personal accounts that I have had from senior police officers, speak of the inability to prosecute serious incitement to religious hatred, which threatens community cohesiveness, corrodes values and puts people in fear and embittered isolation.

I do not think that religious hatred can quite be regarded as a proxy for race either, because it is white British Muslims who have testified to by far the most discrimination, as a survey of over 1,000 British Muslims carried out by the Islamic Human Rights Commission shows.

This provision should encourage us to put ourselves in the place of others. I was a child when my grandfather's relatives were killed in Auschwitz and in my old age I have seen the slaughter at Sarajevo only on television. I have very rarely experienced personal hatred on the grounds of my presumed religion, still less for my humanist beliefs. And I think few of your Lordships may have experienced that kind of hatred. But it happened extensively in Bradford and Burnley and there is evidence that the propagation of hatred is increasing.

We need to make it clear that free debate through all the vehicles of art and humour, to be valued, is a different matter from intimidating, public hatred of the people who hold ideas we may repudiate. Twenty-first century world history should remind us of the difference.


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