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Legislative Process

I will check the record. I was present, and I seem to remember the speech going on for much longer than that. I wanted to speak about the sub judice rule, which is a highly technical piece of parliamentary procedure that I had not come across until I ran into it about two years ago. The case is no longer sub judice so I can mention it. The Foreign Affairs Committee heard evidence from two people who had been arrested and, they allege, tortured in Saudi Arabia. They were held in jail for nearly three years. As a former Foreign Secretary, the Leader of the House is well aware of the case. We wanted to cover that evidence in our report, but two other people who had been arrested at the same time in Saudi Arabia brought a civil action against the Saudi Arabian Government in the British courts. That case dragged on for two years. It has only just finished because it went to the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords. We were told by the Clerks Office that under the sub judice rule we could not refer to the two people who had given us evidence that they were tortured in Saudi Arabia, because there was a parallel case going on in a British court on similar facts that arose at a similar time out of similar incidents. That is far too wide a definition of the sub judice rule to be acceptable to us in carrying out our duties. We were compiling a report on the human rights records of other countries. Saudi Arabia is a country that we look at consistently because it has a very bad record on torture, but we were unable to say in our report that two British citizens alleged that they had been tortured in Saudi Arabia and gave us direct evidence of that, because there was a parallel civil action going on which related to the same facts. In that civil action the Government briefed leading counsel to take part—I am not sure in what capacity, whether as an intervenor or as an amicus curiae. I sought to ask in a written question whether the Government had done that and, if so, what the cost was. I was barred again by the sub judice rule from asking that question for nearly two years. That is wrong, too. My hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield (Sir Nicholas Winterton), who was the Chairman of the Procedure Committee, said that there are good reasons why we in the House should not attempt to have debates and come to conclusions on matters which it is for the courts to decide, and I accept that.