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Binyam Mohamed

My Lords, my noble friend Lady Ramsay is another in this House who has enormous experience of these matters. She has described to us the essential Hippocratic oath of the intelligence-gathering profession: that we must protect our foreign sources and never breach their trust or betray them by releasing, on our own volition, information shared with us. It goes to the heart of the integrity of intelligence co-operation. That copyright of the originator of the intelligence is the central, cardinal principle of international intelligence co-operation. I suspect that many in this House would agree that we jeopardise a lot if we breach it. The noble Baroness pointed to the outrage that we would feel if a court of any one of our close allies was about to unleash or release British secrets to the public of that country in a way that embarrassed us and affected our future intelligence operations. We should put ourselves for a moment in those shoes to understand just how important this principle is.