---

Justice and Security (Northern Ireland) Act 2007 (Extension of duration of non-jury trial provisions) Order 2011

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for outlining the background to the order. I should like to pick up one or two of the comments. Like other noble Lords, of course I regret the fact that it is necessary for this order to come forward again. Perhaps, particularly today, noble Lords might expect me to say that such a thing should not be necessary. In the final IMC report published today, we have said again that it is time for peace process institutions to pass into history and for the proper administration of politics and the rule of law to take place under Northern Ireland authority by Northern Ireland elected representatives. I and my colleagues very much stand by that but it does not necessarily mean that the particular process to which we are referring today should be set to the side immediately. I want to take that a little further. It is clear that there are those in Northern Ireland on the republican side—we sometimes call them dissident republicans—who simply are not persuaded that political arguments should not be made through threat or actual use of violence. They continue to believe that. For a very long time there have been people who have taken that view in Ireland, north and south as well as elsewhere. As the noble Lord, Lord Maginnis of Drumglass, said, it is also clear that there are those in the loyalist community who continue to use violence. With regard to them, I see little evidence that there is any political agenda at all. It is very much about self-aggrandisement and crime. In some cases it is a kind of incipient attack on the police and the historic inquiries team, because some of them simply do not want their past crimes to catch up with them. They want to foment violence, trouble and sectarianism within their own loyalist community. My difficulty, and I think my noble friend will agree, is that despite the fact that the previous Government indicated that a more substantial process would take place, the consultation was very limited. It seems to me that, the next time round, there needs to be a much more substantial consultation at a much earlier stage. Over the past number of years the majority of people—and I say this from my experience in the IMC—have been increasingly prepared to come forward to give evidence and material, to participate in juries and so on. However, I am not wholly sure that we will get to a place in the next two years, or perhaps even a little longer than that, when there will be no fear and no reason for fear in the community. It seems to me that there is something fundamentally unsatisfactory about telling ourselves that in two years it will be fine; in two more years it will be fine; and in another two years it will be fine. We know how long the provisional can stay and that it can become rather permanent. I do not think that that is satisfactory. I wonder whether the notion of non-jury trials is such that they will have to be with us for quite some time. They are not for widespread use—we are talking about only a dozen or perhaps two dozen individuals over a period of 12 months. However, it is still a significant number. I come back to a matter that I and colleagues in the Alliance Party have spoken about in the past—that in such non-jury trials a number of judges might sit together, not on the basis of a two-year order but perhaps on a longer-term basis in circumstances where it proved necessary. We have seen such circumstances in the Megrahi trial, for example, which was a three-judge court, with appeal to a five-judge court. In the past, the argument made by the judicial authorities in Northern Ireland when there were a very large number of cases was that it was completely impossible as the number of judges required would make it completely impractical. There was some force in that argument. However, where we are talking about a very small number of cases it does not seem unreasonable to believe that the judiciary in Northern Ireland might be able to sustain the numbers required. In theory the Diplock courts were unsatisfactory; in practice complaints about justice during the Troubles were more about perverse outcomes such as the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four, which were jury trials, rather than the actions of judges in Northern Ireland. It says a great deal about the calibre of the judges in Northern Ireland over many years that there were not an enormous number of complaints. In principle it was not satisfactory but in practice there was relatively little complaint.