Clause 20
Justice and Security (Northern Ireland) Bill
1:00 pm
Laurence Robertson (Shadow Minister, Northern Ireland; Tewkesbury, Conservative)
The wording of amendment No. 19 is lifted from elsewhere in the Bill, so the Government accept that such a situation is the only time that individuals can be stopped for this particular kind of questioning. Subsection (2) says:
“A member of Her Majesty’s forces on duty may stop a person for so long as is necessary to question him...about a recent explosion or another recent incident endangering life...what he knows about a person”.
That qualifies why individuals can be stopped under subsection (2). Subsection (1) does not actually state why the member of Her Majesty’s forces or the constable would want to stop that person; they could just stop them for no reason at all for as long as they feel necessary. I suggest that subsection (1) is at least badly worded, and probably worse than that.