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Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures Bill

I speak in support of the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick. As the lawyers here who are familiar with disclosure issues involving national security will be aware, there are a number of areas in which there has been a great deal of satellite litigation in cases on the issue of disclosure. I suggest to the Minister that a sound principle could be established here. I suspect that the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, might agree that it is a principle that could be extended to resolve some of the other issues on disclosure that have arisen in cases such as Norwich Pharmacal, Carnduff v Rock—another civil case—the Tariq case and, of course, that of Binyam Mohamed, in which different issues about the level of disclosure that should be permitted have arisen in different contexts. One of those issues relates to the control principle: the control that a foreign intelligence agency exerts over intelligence material available in the United Kingdom. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, agrees that reducing all those principles to statutory form would be of great assistance and would provide something that gets us lawyers out of work but increases certainty—that is, legal certainty.