Clause 57
Counter-Terrorism Bill
12:45 pm
Dominic Grieve (Shadow Attorney General, Law Officers; Beaconsfield, Conservative)
I join my right hon. and learned Friend in having the gravest reservations about the wording of clause 57, in terms of setting down general provisions about rules of court. I also share his anxiety about disclosure, although on my reading, the rules on disclosure closely follow those on the existing system for control orders in providing protection for the use of intercept and other intelligence evidence. That raises anxieties, but they do not seem to justify the extraordinary nature of the rules in clause 57.
The Committee will see that I have tabled two amendments to clause 57. The first would remove subsection (3)(b), which says that rules of court may make provision—
“enabling or requiring the proceedings to be determined without a hearing”.
The second one would leave out subsection (4)(a), which allows the rules of court to make provision—
“enabling the proceedings to take place without full particulars of the reasons for the decisions to which the proceedings relate being given to a party to the proceedings (or to any legal representative of that party);”
Those provisions cause me considerable concern about how the proceedings can be fair. If the matter of amendment No. 208 can be construed as being in the context of intelligence evidence, enabling or requiring proceedings to be determined without a hearing is something that I find totally inexplicable. On the face of it, I cannot see how any rules of court which make such a provision could pass the first and most basic test of fairness that one may require. I would be particularly interested, therefore, in the Government’s justification of it.
What is needed now is a general debate in which I expect the Minister to set out in considerable detail how he expects this system to work in practice. I also going to require him to justify each and every one of the provisions which depart from the normal standards that one would expect to find in civil proceedings of this type.
I want to make it clear that I am not unsupportive of the need to have a special procedure. It has been recognised that we want to try to use intercept evidence, and that in itself is a novelty that is going to present considerable details to the Minister and to the Government. But the process has to be fair—all the more so because we are not dealing with controlling individuals, which might be argued to be an absolute necessity in the context of terrorism; we are arguing about property, and I am going to need a lot of persuasion that each and every one of these provisions is necessary. However, I would say to the Minister that I am open to persuasion.