Schedule 4
Counter-Terrorism Bill
12:00 pm
Dominic Grieve (Shadow Attorney General, Law Officers; Beaconsfield, Conservative)
I am sympathetic to the point raised by the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome, and indeed my concerns about this go further. We are setting up a system that requires notification of conviction for foreign offences and whilst in many cases this may present no problems in the general acceptance that the individual has been justly convicted in a foreign country of a terrorist offence that requires notification, I can readily envisage that perhaps, unlike sexual offences, there may be instances where individuals challenge the basis on which they were convicted and whether in fact their actions constituted a terrorism offence. This may well turn out to be a fertile field for judicial review applications.
Can one be required to notify, or to go through a notification procedure which, as the Government have acknowledged—because they cannot make it retrospective—has an element of a penal sanction, and can that be done in circumstances where a court in this country cannot be satisfied that the offence was in fact committed? Clearly, taking the hon. Gentleman’s example, if there is evidence that the conviction was obtained on the basis of evidence obtained under torture, for reasons that we have already rehearsed very well in this country, we know that the courts will not be very sympathetic to that. I think it could even go wider and I wonder what view the Government have as to the chances of this being a contentious area, because I think it may well turn out to be so.