Counter-Terrorism and Sentencing Bill — House of Lords, 2021-02-09
Topic: Law and Crime
David Anderson (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, TPIMs, or terrorism prevention and investigation measures, are the successors to, and relatives of, control orders. They may be imposed at the discretion of the Secretary of State, unless a court, on a preliminary look, considers them "obviously flawed", if specified criteria are satisfied. They are summarised like this in the March 2020 annual report of the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation: "There are up to 14 measures that can be imposed including overnight residence requirements; relocation to another part of the United Kingdom; police reporting; an electronic monitoring tag; exclusion from specific places; limits on association; limits on the use of financial services and use of telephones and computers; and a ban on holding travel documents. Breach of any measure is a criminal offence." It is common for all or substantially all of those measures to be imposed, severely limiting the basic freedoms of the subjects and impinging heavily on their families. Relocation—removed by the coalition in 2012—was reinstated in 2015. Additional measures are, of course, contained in the Bill The issue raised by Clause 37 and by these amendments, including Amendment 27 in my name and that of my noble and learned friend Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, is: how strongly must the Secretary of State suspect a person of involvement in terrorism before choosing to impose a TPIM on them? Since TPIMs succeeded control orders in 2012, the Secretary of State has been required to have a reasonable belief that the intended subject is or has been involved in terrorism-related activity—a belief, in other words, that the person has been involved in some capacity in the wide range of activity spelled out in Section 4 of the TPIM Act 2011. That range is not limited to the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism; it extends also to those who encourage, support and assist such behaviour. Nor need any specific act of terrorism be in prospect The "reasonable belief" formulation was amended in 2015 to one of satisfaction on the balance of probabilities, but the meaning is to all intents and purposes the same. The bottom line is that, before imposing this most extreme of all executive measures, the Home Secretary needs to have formed the view only that someone is, or was, probably involved in terrorism. That is already an easy standard to satisfy in the case of anyone who is likely to be a candidate for a TPIM—resource-intensive measures, as they are, that are not lightly applied for It is not a court that has to apply the balance of probabilities, on the basis only of admissible evidence. The judgment is entrusted to the Secretary of State, and she makes it, crucially, on the basis not just of admissible evidence but of the intelligence assessments with which she is provided by the Security Service and others. Such intelligence far exceeds what could be placed before a civil or criminal court. It is likely to include intercept material, or material supplied by foreign liaison partners who are unwilling to see it deployed in a public setting, or reports from a covert human intelligence source, whose existence could never be publicly disclosed. The Secretary of State sees all that in the form of documents, which, when I reviewed these things, I repeatedly described as thorough and conscientious. Everything is available to her, and she is required to conclude only that it probably demonstrates some involvement, past or present, in terrorism-related activity.