Clause 42
Counter-Terrorism Bill
11:15 am
Dominic Grieve (Shadow Attorney General, Law Officers; Beaconsfield, Conservative)
I sympathise with the points made by the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome, and the amendment that I have tabled that comes next in sequence is very similar in intention. It is a probing amendment looking at the question of whether the court should have any discretion as to whether notification should be required.
We will consider this, I suppose, when we come to the related section on duration in clause 51, which states that anybody sentenced to a period of more than five years is required to submit to notification for the rest of their lives. On any showing, that is a fairly onerous requirement. While it is certainly not intended to be punitive, it is nevertheless a considerable intrusion on a person’s private and family life, particularly because, in addition to the explicit requirements laid down in clause 51, it is clear that it will be possible for the Secretary of State to make by affirmative order further requirements—the nature of which we currently do not know—in respect of notification. That is something we will come back to and can perhaps debate further later this morning.
One should not lose sight of the fact that, while notification is a very important requirement and one which may well be for public protection, we are widening the scope of intrusive state powers and removing the old principle that when a person had finished serving their sentence they were, effectively, on the way to rehabilitation and, apart from the requirements of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 for notification in getting a job, were free to do what they like.
The justification always advanced for including sex offenders in a notification system was that they appeared to have a propensity to commit such offences and were not amenable to rehabilitation, and that under no circumstances was rehabilitation justified because in truth we could have little confidence that it was ever going to be possible. That is rather different from terrorist offences. In this country, at the moment, there are previously convicted terrorists serving in Government in Northern Ireland, and we appear to have accepted that it is possible for them to change their ways.
Indeed, if we are to beat the current menace of terrorism in this country, I have absolutely no doubt that it will come about only by virtue of the fact that some people who are attracted to terrorism at present will decide to abandon it, and may well turn out to be rather important citizens. There are already one or two examples of people who have been lured into this area already and are now writing books about their experiences.