Schedule - Hatred against people on racial or religious grounds
Racial and Religious Hatred Bill
1:00 pm
Dominic Grieve (Shadow Attorney General, (Assist the Home Affairs Team); Beaconsfield, Conservative)
I beg to move amendment No. 23, in page 2, line 23, at end insert—
‘(4)In subsection (3) at end insert “but no power of arrest shall reside with any other person including any person empowered to do so by virtue of section 110 of the Serious and Organised Crime and Police Act 2005.”.’.
May I welcome you to the Chair, Mr. Benton? We seem to be enjoying a series of different faces appearing to chair this Committee. We have achieved diversity during our sittings, and even if our proceedings this afternoon are short, I hope that you may nevertheless find them interesting.
Amendment No. 23 raises the issue that I raised on Second Reading, about powers of arrest. As a result of a Bill that we passed into law in the previous Session—the Serious and Organised Crime and Police Act 2005—we altered the rules relating to powers of arrest. The Minister will be familiar with that. One consequence is that citizens can carry out arrests for all indictable offences. The offence under this Bill will of course be an indictable offence.
The public are likely over time to realise that the law has changed. In any event the maximum penalty for the offence under the Bill was going up from two to seven years. In the days when there was a two-year maximum penalty, the offence was not arrestable. I have serious reservations if the offence is made arrestable by means of citizen’s arrest, and let me explain why.
We know, by virtue of the fact that the Government have mentioned the existence of the Attorney-General’s discretion, that there will be many instances where somebody may technically—or even more than technically—fall foul of the law, but no decision to prosecute will be made. I ask the Minister to consider for a moment what will happen.
The prospect of this law has excited a great deal of public comment. In some religious communities and groups, it is a matter of either great enthusiasm or great anxiety. The evidence from Australia, albeit where there is a slightly different system, is that the advent of such a law led to people attending public meetings as a fifth column—if I may put it that way—in order to see whether the law was being broken. I cannot believe that scenes of individuals approaching platforms on which speeches are being made and without the presence of the police purporting to arrest—or actually arresting—platform speakers under the provisions of section 110 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 will make a good contribution to community relations in this country.
Furthermore, I apprehend not only that that could be a trigger for violence, but that in most cases where arrests are made, no prosecution will ever take place. People will then try to bring claims for wrongful arrest against those who arrested them, but they will not succeed, because it will be pointed out that, as the reading of the Act is cast so wide, even though the Attorney-General has taken the decision that it is not in the public interest to prosecute, arrest may have been justified in the first place. I urge the Minister and the Government to think carefully about that; it is a recipe for disaster.
The offence under the Bill falls into the category of offences for which, in my judgment, there is little requirement for a citizen to have a power of arrest. I assume that the circumstances in which the Government intend that a prosecution should be brought or initiated would be only after mature reflection on what somebody has said, or by the intervention of a dedicated police taskforce that would be alive to the sensitivities involved. I ask the Government to make an exception from the ordinary powers of arrest and ensure that it can be only a police officer in uniform who can arrest for the offence of religious hatred. I accept, of course, that that would apply to racial hatred as well. There may be other considerations to be had on that, but in reality, if one goes in, the other goes in. It is highly undesirable that individuals should be arresting other people for what they are saying rather than for what they are doing. The power to arrest somebody on the basis that they may be committing, or about to commit, a breach of the peace, exists anyway.
I can think of no requirement for there being a citizen’s arrest in a case of this kind. If he agrees with me, he might consider the amendment satisfactory for achieving that end. Alternatively, he might tell me that somebody would like to draft it differently, in which case I would be only too happy to let that happen.