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Justice and Security (Northern Ireland) Bill

There is a problem with that. If I may, I shall just explain why. Public interest immunity—I say this for other readers of this debate—is a procedure under which the prosecution goes to a judge to say, ““Please will you relieve us of the obligation of disclosing this information to the defence””. That is only where the prosecution is not seeking to rely on that information. The classic case in which public immunity arises is where the prosecution has unused material, which it is generally under an obligation to disclose if it is relevant, but it wants to say to the judge, ““We do not want to disclose this information. We are not seeking to rely on it. We think that, at most, it is of very marginal relevance to the defendant's case. We do not think that it is at all relevant, but we want to be relieved of the obligation””. PII does not of itself enable one to go to a judge to say, ““We want you to rely on this information in reaching your decision but you cannot tell the defence about it. You cannot reach a decision about whether it is right that the DPP has reached his decision, but you cannot tell the defence””. In order to do that, you would need a different procedure which, I think, would have to be some form of statutory procedure under which the court would have some different advocate able to deal with the material—a special advocate. There are difficulties about that procedure, which is why one comes back to the whole question of how it is appropriate to deal with it. I see the noble Lord, Lord Trimble, looking concerned about what I have said, but let me repeat: PII is not a procedure under which you can say to a judge, ““We want to say that this man is guilty of this offence. We have some secret information that we want you to see but he cannot see it””. That we do not do, and rightly. So I do not think that the PII is an answer to that problem and that is why I say that it is necessary to reflect on how one can otherwise deal with this issue.