Clause 20

Part of Counter-Terrorism Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 6:14 pm on 29 April 2008.

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Photo of Dominic Grieve Dominic Grieve Shadow Attorney General 6:14, 29 April 2008

I am grateful to you, Mr. O’Hara.

I am, perhaps, less kind to the Minister than my hon. Friend the Member for Newark is about the phrase under discussion, which is quite deliberately obfuscatory. I do not think that it can be reworded, because it would have to be reworded either one way or another. One way would be to do something that is unlawful, and pass retrospective legislation giving a blanket exemption to the security services for past potential misdeeds, which is not what the phrase says. The alternative would be to water it down still further, in which case the question would be, why is it there at all?

I am a little puzzled, because it is not right for the Committee, or indeed for the House, to construct a statement making it potentially impossible or more difficult for a person, if they were minded to do so, to make an allegation of illegality against any public authority or organisation. The Minister has nailed his colours to the mast, and I have never suggested that the Security Service or the Secret Intelligence Service have acted illegally in that area, which is about disclosure anyway. I rather take his view that the common law has covered it perfectly adequately in the past and it is not an issue. We have a common law right to do all sorts of things. I, as a lawyer, have an absolute common law right, for example, to disregard legal privilege if I think that legal privilege in information imparted to me is for the commission of crime. It is in fact my duty in those circumstances to tell somebody about it, irrespective of the legal professional privilege that may attach to it. I do not think that that is the issue. However, in those circumstances, I am remain puzzled about why subsection (4) is in the Bill at all, unless it is because somebody has a superabundance of caution or got unnecessarily twitched up.