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Prevention and Suppression of Terrorism

I am grateful to my right hon. and learned Friend for that. I will not venture to give an expert view on foreign affairs, a subject that I am not accredited to speak on; I am no expert. It might interest him to know that I was in Damascus during the Whitsun recess with Members from both sides of the House, and heard about the delicate, vital negotiations to which he refers, and which we hope will lead to peace. I venture no view on whether the order will make peace more or less likely, but I hope that he will give us his views on the subject. With your permission, Madam Deputy Speaker, I should like to ask the Minister some questions that might assist my right hon. and learned Friend to understand what lies behind the order, and exactly why the Government seek an extension to ban the entire military wing at this particular time, and in this particular way. So that the Minister does not misinterpret what I say—not that he ever does that, although some people think that he misinterprets what I say on a range of security and policing issues—I repeat that we do not oppose the order, so he must not take my questions as an indication of scepticism about the intent of Her Majesty's Government. We Opposition Members are merely trying to understand why the order is being brought forward now, and what the evidence is for doing so. When the Prime Minister announced the decision to proscribe the whole military wing of Hezbollah, he gave us some clues to the Government's thinking. On 2 July, in Prime Minister's questions, he indicated that the proposal before us was based"““solely on the grounds of new evidence of its””—" that is, Hezbollah's—"““involvement in terrorism in Iraq and the occupied Palestinian territories.””" I should be grateful if the Minister expanded on what the evidence is to which the Prime Minister referred and said when that new evidence came to light. Does the reference to terrorism in Iraq include any specific threat to, for instance, UK personnel there? Is there any specific evidence of a threat to the United Kingdom, or to UK interests elsewhere? The Prime Minister went on to say:"““Proscription will not affect Hezbollah's legitimate political and social wings”” —[Official Report, 2 July 2008; Vol. 478, c. 860.]" Will the Minister explain exactly how that distinction will work in practice, if the order is agreed and implemented? Will he tell us something about what the political and social wings are, and how the objectives of the political and social wings differ from those of the military wing? The Prime Minister's remarks imply separate wings of Hezbollah that operate independently of one another. To what extent does Sheikh Nasrallah's contact with, or control over, Hezbollah politicians in Lebanon figure in what the Government are trying to achieve with the proscription order? I ask because other organisations proscribed by this Government, or by Governments prior to 1997, such as the Tamil Tigers and the Kurdish PKK, had both political and military wings. In those two cases, Her Majesty's Government decided to proscribe the whole organisation—that is, both the political and the military parts. On what basis did the Government decide to proscribe, in this order, just the military wing of Hezbollah? That is an interesting question, given that they went the whole hog in relation to the Tamils and the Kurdish organisation to which I referred.