Official Secrets

Part of Prayers – in the House of Commons at 9:36 am on 22 July 1988.

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Photo of Hon. Douglas Hurd Hon. Douglas Hurd , Witney 9:36, 22 July 1988

I cannot comment on the verdicts of juries in any recent case. I have not done so and I will not do so. I am simply referring to the future. I am trying to deal with the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Orpington (Mr. Stanbrook) that by doing away with the notion of ministerial certificates, we are placing too heavy a weight on the jury. I do not think that that is so.

Even if the jury decides that a disclosure is likely to cause the specified harm to public interest, the discloser will be convicted only if he knew or had reason to believe that such harm was likely to be caused. It is clearly wrong to penalise somebody who had no way of knowing the harm that he was doing. Our proposals will ensure that such a person is not liable to conviction.

Those are the essential elements—the backbone—of our proposals. I hope that most people will accept that they are coherent and reasonable. I want now to address briefly a number of specific anxieties which have been raised.

I mentioned earlier the test of harm to be applied to the disclosure of information relating to security or intelligence. We are not proposing that any such test should apply to disclosure of such information by members or former members of the security and intelligence services or certain other people. This is nothing new. The people in these categories cannot now disclose such information without authority, without risking criminal proceedings. We are not making life more difficult or matters worse for them. We are simply leaving them, for the reasons that we have given in the White Paper, essentially as they are.

I stress again that I am talking about disclosures without authority. Members and former members of the services have in the past been authorised to talk or write about their work, and they will be so authorised in the future, but for a member to disclose information about security and intelligence without authority is, we believe, a betrayal of the trust that the nation places in those services, for very good reasons—because of the nature of the work they do and of the protection they provide for all of us.

We propose that certain people should be designated as having the same criminal liability as members or former members of the services, and the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Sparkbrook (Mr. Hattersley) expressed some concern about this power. Those who are designated will be so told when they are designated, so there is no question of someone being designated because he is thought to be troublesome, or of his being designated retrospectively after an alleged offence. Designation will not be applied to all those who have contact with the security and intelligence services, still less to all those who see the information provided by those services. A certain number of people have duties that involve them working so closely with the security and intelligence services that they acquire an extensive knowledge of their organisation and operations, and we think that these people should share the same liability as members and former members of those services.