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Counter-Terrorism Bill

The noble Baroness should not assume that I automatically meant her party. Something I have come across throughout my career is that people who have responsibility for something often have a slightly different view of it. That was all I meant. The noble Baroness, Lady Stern, said that the amendments were exploratory, and I shall take them all together. On Amendment No. 34, we believe that extension hearings are already fully adversarial and that most of the proposals put forward in the amendments are already covered in existing provisions on the extension of detention in Schedule 8 to the Terrorism Act 2000. It is already a requirement that public authorities act in accordance with the ECHR under the Human Rights Act 1998. Nothing in Schedule 8 might require a judicial authority to act in any way other than compatibly with Article 5.4 or any other convention right, so the proposed new paragraph 29(7) is completely unnecessary. The extension hearings are a mechanism by which we give effect to Article 5.4. They provide a judicial hearing under which the lawfulness of the suspect’s detention is reviewed. Schedule 8 to the Terrorism Act 2000 already provides for the detained person to make written or oral representations and be legally represented. Extension hearings apply only to people held on suspicion of terrorist offences or involvement in terrorist activity in any event. The prosecution must demonstrate to the judge that there are reasonable grounds for believing that the further detention is necessary, that the investigation is being conducted diligently and expeditiously and why more time is needed to obtain, preserve, examine or analyse relevant evidence. Sometimes an ex parte hearing—closed part—is required during the application process to authorise the withholding of information from the detainee. These are not routine and can be ordered only on limited and proportionate grounds. They are only a part of the process and are closed for a reason: for example, to prevent evidence being destroyed or that others might be alerted to the detail of the investigations. The judge may also exclude the detainee from part of the application hearing itself under paragraph 33. The grounds on which this exclusion may be made are left to the discretion of the judge. This process has been endorsed by the House of Lords in the case of Ward v Police Service of Northern Ireland. The detainee may need to be excluded where, for example, the judge wants to examine with the police what further lines of inquiry they wish to put to the suspect in interview. The police are entitled to withhold this information from the suspect until the interview itself; therefore, only by excluding the suspect could the judge examine the legitimacy of this reason for why further detention is necessary. Conducting this examination is in the detainee’s best interests; it ensures that there really are proper lines of inquiry left to conduct. However, it is important to note that closed hearings get rarer as time goes on. In fact, in extension applications for 17 individuals after the 14-day point, only one ex parte hearing has been conducted by the prosecution.  We continue to believe that extension proceedings are currently fully adversarial. The one that I saw at Paddington Green was amazingly thorough. It gave the man the opportunity to know what was going on and gave the judge the opportunity to really see what the police were doing; indeed, the judge gave the police a hard time and granted them only a small extension. The suspect is entitled to legal representation and to be present at the open part of the hearing.