Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill — House of Lords, 2015-01-20
Topic: Law and Crime
Jonathan Toby Harris (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, a series of very important questions have been posed to the Minister. I want to add just a few more. It is important that there is clarity as to how this is going to work, for all the reasons that the Committee has touched on already about the possible blowback and the negative implications of this clearly not working or not working in the way that Ministers hope it will. There are some very serious and complicated issues I have still not fully understood—I appreciate what was gone through at Second Reading—why this is not, in practice, rendering an individual stateless. I am told that this is because it is just temporary. But the Bill contains the power to renew it for a further two years, and potentially indefinitely. First, what is the justification for having any power to renew a temporary exclusion order? Surely within two years it will have been possible to arrange this managed return, so why is it there? Surely it must imply that there is an expectation that some orders will be renewed and the thing will be continued and will go on and on. In which case, we need to understand why that is and why it does not in effect render the individual stateless Secondly, I want to hear from the Minister the implications in terms of how other nations will react to the fact that there is an individual in their country who has been labelled by this country as a suspicious person who has engaged in acts of terrorism, which is why a temporary exclusion order has been served on them. What are those countries going to do with the individual concerned? The noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, raised the issue of torture, and I do not think that is fanciful. These are individuals whom the British Government have labelled as people we are so concerned about that we want to put restrictions on what is going to come back with them. Other countries are not as squeamish or civil libertarian as perhaps we are in this country or some other European states and they will say, "Right, if the British Government say this individual is potentially dangerous, we must react as though they are potentially dangerous". We know what happens in some of those countries to people whom they regard as potentially dangerous The cynical—those who are trying to manufacture trouble on this, trying to feed the narrative that leads to violent extremism and jihadism—will say that this is exactly what the Government want. They want people to be permanently excluded. They would be delighted if they are then tortured in another country. That is what cynical conspiracy theorists will say about this, so it is critical that we understand what the status in another country will be of people whom we have labelled in this way. What will be the level of consular protection and support? Will this be by agreement with the countries concerned? What will we do in cases where we do not have the sort of relationship with the countries concerned that will enable that to happen? What if the country says, "Okay, the British Government say this person is dangerous and that he cannot fly. We aren’t interested in that. We are deporting him to the United Kingdom"? Presumably, if such people turned up on the doorstep, they would immediately be subject to a TPIM. I assume so, but that would not be a managed return; they would have just arrived because they had been deported. What if they are deported somewhere else? What happens about the recipient country These are important questions. The way in which we treat individuals about whom we have suspicion is extremely important because other countries will assume that because we are treating them as suspicious, there is something that they, too, should be concerned about, and they may take steps accordingly I hope the Minister will make the best of the very large number of notes that he has now received on all these points. These are important issues that we need to clarify. While we as a nation must do what needs to be done in respect of individuals who have been in a war zone and come back radicalised and potentially very dangerous, we need to understand how that process will work, and it is not clear to me that this is the most effective and least potentially counterproductive way of handing those cases.