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Terrorism Bill

It is sometimes said that hard cases make bad law, and here I am concerned about what might happen to someone who was found guilty on the basis indicated by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Cameron; that is, that he or she had, as it were, blundered into such a place and could not show until some little time later that that was the basis on which they had spent some time in the camp before leaving. I speak with firsthand experience of this. A few years ago I happened to be in the remoter parts of the Wyoming Wind River mountain range and, to my considerable surprise, found myself on a plateau where a number of gentlemen were bouncing around in 4x4s which were heavily armoured. I was surprised to see this and made an immediate assumption that they were part of the United States Army on a training exercise. It was nothing of the kind. It was a so-called ““freedom militia”” that would train in the remote areas of the Wind River mountains in order to mount terrorist attacks on the United States Government. Their reasons for doing so were much the same as those that attended the Oklahoma case. Noble Lords will recall that that terrorism was based on an extreme form of libertarianism which resented any kind of federal authority and therefore used terrorist methods more like a form of anarchism than anything to do with al-Qaeda to demonstrate their resistance and dislike of it. We should not be so simple-minded that we do not recognise that there can be groups of this kind. They may meet in rather remote places where it would take some time to prove that one had left the area immediately. I believe that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Cameron, has put his finger on a real situation—I repeat, one that I have encountered myself—and that we should be cautious about condemning someone with a maximum penalty of 10 years’ imprisonment. They may have made every effort to leave the area as soon as they became aware of what was going on. From my own experience, that could take a couple of hours to prove because one tends to think at first that such a group is engaged in a legitimate mobilisation or military training exercise. One may not know immediately that it is a terrorist training camp. I commend the amendment moved by the noble and learned Lord to the Government. They would lose nothing by accepting it; rather they would simply avoid the condemnation of what may be a small number of completely innocent people.