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Terrorism (Detention and Human Rights)

The key difference between the two reports is that the Joint Committee on Human Rights particularly emphasised the need for a court to be able to draw adverse inferences; the Home Affairs Committee report did not focus particularly on that issue. Being able to draw such inferences makes a difference: if a suspect knew that if he refused to answer questions, the judge would say to the jury, ““He wouldn’t answer; members of the jury can decide why he didn’t””, that would concentrate his mind. If he did not answer, the jury would know where it stood.