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The Duke of Montrose: My Lords, it is a great privilege to follow the noble Baroness, whose speech ranged over such wide and meaningful issues.

I should like first to express sympathy with the Minister in her complaint about the after-effects of the Prevention of Terrorism Bill. I almost feel as though I have to pinch myself to be sure that it is not still Thursday and the clocks have not been restarted. Once again we are groping with the problems thrown up by an underworld fired up by shady deals and modern technology and frequently operating on an international scale.

Noble Lords seem to agree that the Bills currently before Parliament or promised by the Government for the next Session represent a major new construct for
 
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policing, crime detection and justice. If these Bills represent the only way that we have to deal with these issues, it will be a major task for all of us to get it right.

I notice from a briefing supplied by the Police Federation, and referred to by my noble friend Lady Anelay, that the Bill will change for ever the unique characteristics that have defined policing for over 175 years. The noble Baroness, Lady Harris of Richmond, gave a fairly full description of the concerns voiced by the Scottish Police Federation about the Bill's proposal to remove the total independence of the authority of chief constables.

The Bill talks of the drive for consistency of approach, but that could so easily be frustrated if the relationship between the new agency and the existing police forces is not satisfactorily thought through and defined.

It would appear that one of the ideas in the Bill is that politicians should be architecting and driving the programme, rather than mainly supervising the activities of the various police forces. Does that not mean that if you are on the receiving end of some law officer's activities, in the final analysis it will not be much use hoping that you can appeal to the Secretary of State for a review should you think that you have suffered some injustice? Does this not represent a further erosion of the separation of powers which has been such a feature of our freedoms but which has appeared to be a rather low priority for this Government?

As we progress through the Bill, I hope that it will become a little clearer, for the Scottish context, what the relationship is to be between the Lord Advocate and the Scottish Ministers. The Lord Advocate currently has the responsibility for the prosecution of crime, the direction of prosecuting authorities and the investigation of sudden and suspicious deaths. Under Clause 23, he is to have responsibility for the direction of SOCA in Scotland. But then we have the Scottish Ministers, who are to be involved in the annual plan, in how SOCA intends to exercise its functions, and in determining the strategic priorities, the performance targets and the codes of practice. Finally, there is the Secretary of State, who will have chatted to the Ministers, but will have power to impose "a requirement" relating to any of the functions or activities of SOCA. It seems to me that there could be quite some grounds for considerable confusion among all those directors.

If there is to be any discretion over the powers and the circumstances in which they are exercised, one has to ask whether there should not be a role for the Scottish Parliament. Given the propensity of the Scottish Parliament to stop and discuss almost any subject, I am sure that it will take the chance to look at the matter, anyway.

I thank the Minister for her assurance that the training of officers who will find themselves operating in different spheres is in the forefront of the Government's thinking. It is important, as was voiced earlier, that those who have to come from other parts of the UK to operate in Scotland will have to know how to operate under a different system of law.
 
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The Law Society of Scotland has expressed some concern on a number of these issues and no doubt will wish to see amendments brought forward in Committee. In particular, it has a worry about the different duration of sentencing powers in the Bill—in Clause 49, in relation to assaults, obstruction or deception—as opposed to those that are available for the protection of police officers in similar circumstances under the Police (Scotland) Act 1967. Can the Minister tell us whether there will be any provision to bring measures in other Acts which are analogous into line with what is proposed in the Bill, or is the agency to have special protection as well as special power?

There is a sense of approval for the proposal to extend the Private Security Industry Act 2001 to Scotland, but there is a need to clarify whether the Security Industry Authority will act as the designated body to receive and deal with complaints about the abuse of powers by precognition agents?

The advantages of such a body as we are being asked to consider were most usefully elaborated particularly by those Members of your Lordships' House who have had intimate police experience. I was most interested in the improvements suggested by the noble Baroness, Lady Henig, in her most interesting speech. There are aspects that will need close attention, but I am prepared to welcome the Bill.

Lord Avebury: My Lords, I welcome the proposals on the incitement to religious hatred, which go back a long way—much earlier than the 2002 Act, which has been mentioned, and at least to 1981, when the Law Commission examined religious offences and observed that the concepts of a "racial group" under the Race Relations Act 1976 and membership of a group which is distinguished by a common religion were "closely linked". It said that if, in future, there appeared to be a substantial problem relating to material which was in substance an attack on those holding particular beliefs, it would be a relatively simple matter to amend the Public Order Act accordingly. It was not a proximate matter for consideration at that time, because there were no attempts at that time to incite hatred against groups belonging to any religion, which was not also a racial group in law.

That situation has changed, unfortunately, since the extreme right has now targeted the Muslim community. That was amply demonstrated by the evidence given to the Select Committee on Religious Offences by the Home Office, the Attorney-General, the DPP, the Metropolitan Police and the West Yorkshire Police. Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, acknowledges that he can make statements about Muslims that would be illegal if he said them about black people. Nevertheless, it is argued, and has been repeated several times today, that there is no need to grant the same protection to Muslims or Christians as we have for years to Sikhs or Jews, because, they say, race is determined from birth, while religion is a matter of choice, as if that justified the distinction.
 
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Yet in Northern Ireland the law treats race and religion identically in the law on incitement; and in Great Britain a range of offences attract higher sentences if they are racially or religiously aggravated. To make a distinction that allows incitement to hatred of some religious groups and not others is not only absurd, as the noble Lord, Lord Alli, said, but is manifestly irrational and callous. We would be saying that incitement to hatred of Jews or Sikhs should be a criminal offence, but incitement to hatred of Christians or Muslims is okay. If, as a result of hatred being incited against Muslims, individual Muslims are attacked in the street or in their mosques, will you then say that it is of no consequence, because they chose to be Muslim? The effect on the victims is the same, as I sought to argue in my intervention in the speech of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern.

Noble Lords will remember the case of Abdullah el-Feisal, who was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment in March 2003 for incitement to murder under the Offences Against the Person Act 1861. The offence was that he urged his listeners to kill non-believers, Americans, Hindus and Jews. He got an extra two years for incitement to racial hatred because three out of the four groups he wanted people to murder were protected by the existing law. It is okay to incite hatred against non-believers and, if he confined himself to that group, he would have received a sentence two years less than he was given.

As the Minister said at the beginning of this debate, when these proposals first appeared, the main thrust of the criticism was that they would stifle free speech. Evangelical Christians said that they would be unable to attack other people's religious beliefs; comedians said that they would be prevented from making jokes about religion; and Nicholas Hytner, the head of the National Theatre, said that certain plays would become illegal. He claims the right to be as offensive as he pleases about what other people think and implies that plays challenging people's religious beliefs, such as one by Howard Brenton to be presented at the National later this year, are at risk.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, said, I believe that it would have helped to clarify the law if the Government had agreed to abolish blasphemy at the same time, as was proposed in the Religious Offences Bill in 2002. I shall be tabling an amendment for that purpose, which I am sure the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Portsmouth and perhaps also the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, will agree to support.

We are not about protecting beliefs but believers, as has been said. If we get rid of the remnants of blasphemy, that will underline the "right to offend", as Rowan Atkinson has called it, which is protected by the Human Rights Act. Subject to the law on blasphemy, which is better left for discussion in Committee, you can say whatever you like about another person's beliefs or sacred objects, the only limits being those of taste.

The opposition now appears to centre on the opposite assertion that expectations have been aroused, when the area of conduct dealt with here is
 
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very narrow. One or two speeches today, including, I think, that of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, have somehow managed to combine the two criticisms—that is, on the one hand, that we are going to stifle freedom of expression and, on the other, that expectations have been aroused by the magnitude of the coverage of this Bill, which is unjustified. The new offence is bounded on one side by the Human Rights Act, although none of those who spoke against Schedule 10 even mentioned that Act and nor did any of those who spoke at Second Reading in the Commons, and it is bounded on the other side by the common law offence of incitement to commit any other crime.

In between is the use of language which does not call on people to commit a specific offence but which is threatening, abusive or insulting and intended to incite religious hatred or is likely to do so. The tests are identical for incitement to both religious and racial hatred. We would create enormous difficulties for the police, the CPS and the courts if we decided to enact different tests according to whether or not the group being targeted consisted of Jews or Sikhs on the one hand or Muslims or Christians on the other.

I agree that some people had an inflated idea of what was proposed on religious incitement, as shown by the evidence to our Select Committee. We obviously did not manage to dispel the misunderstandings, but there were years of discussion—not only here but in Europe, where a Council framework decision on racism and xenophobia would have required comprehensive legislation against incitement to hatred against groups,

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Alli, that we should extend that to groups defined by their sexual orientation. It would be useful to know whether the Government are considering the resuscitation of that proposal during the UK's presidency after June.

The magnitude of what we are proposing here is indicated by the fact that only 10 prosecutions for incitement to racial hatred were commenced in the past five years. The problems of bringing offenders to justice would be the same for religious hatred. But, as the Select Committee pointed out, the law may have been successful in deterring far more offences than have been prosecuted. That surely is the point of this provision.

Turning to another matter which has been discussed, from the debates that we had on the Anti-social Behaviour Bill, it was clear that the existing powers of the police to deal with harassment and intimidation of persons in some way connected with lawful animal research organisations, which, as has been said, operate under one of the strictest licensing regimes in the world, are being targeted by well co-ordinated groups of extremists who set out to damage and, if possible, bring to an end their legitimate activities. They threaten people's lives and make them a misery and, in 2004, the extremists persuaded 100 suppliers to sever their connections with Huntingdon Life Sciences Company.
 
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The UK has so far led the world in the development of therapies for diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer's and AIDS, and only last week the Commission for Africa focused on the need to increase spending on combating AIDS, which killed 2 million people in sub-Saharan Africa in 2004 alone, to $10 billion a year. Earlier this afternoon, the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, gave details of the universities and laboratories in the UK which are working on the commission's priorities, including the development of microbicides, TB drugs, AIDS and malaria vaccines, paediatric ARV and malaria drugs, and drugs for paediatric diseases. If the United Kingdom is to play a significant role in implementing the commission's report, our scientists need the protection that they would get from this legislation.


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