Clause 20
Counter-Terrorism Bill
6:14 pm
Dominic Grieve (Shadow Attorney General, Law Officers; Beaconsfield, Conservative)
I beg to move amendment No. 69, in page 15, line 33, leave out subsection (4).
Subsection (4) states:
“Nothing in that section shall be read as casting doubt on the legality of anything done by any of the intelligence services before that section came into force.”
I hope that the Minister will excuse the fact that a smile crossed my face when I read that. I assume from this nice, little clause, which is entitled “supplementary provisions”, that in the past the intelligence services might have made disclosures on an informal basis that were not subject to statutory systems—I hinted at that earlier. As a result of the Bill, they will be subject to a statutory framework, which is extremely important and useful.
However, I have one concern: I do not think that this Committee’s role should be to pass retrospective legislation that provides blanket exemptions for past activities. I know of no example of the intelligence services being taken to task over what they might have done in this area, but one way of reading subsection (4) suggests that it seeks to do that. However, another way of reading it suggests that one cannot quote what we have now legislated on and pray it in aid as an example of the new framework when looking at the old framework. For those reasons, I am not completely comfortable with subsection (4), because it either has a purpose or it has not. If there is no purpose to it, it should not be there, and if there is a purpose, we need more detail on what it is.