Lords vow to scrap ‘encouragement’ terror clause
The government’s terrorism bill has passed its second reading in the Lords, although peers signalled their determination to scrap a new offence of encouraging terrorism at later stages.
The controversial legislation has already faced a rough ride in the Commons, where plans to give police power to hold terrorist suspects for up to 90 days without charge were scrapped.
Instead, MPs voted to extend the current detention limit of 14 days to 28 days, and to introduce a sunset clause, so these powers will expire in a year’s time.
During yesterday’s debate, Home Office minister Baroness Scotland said the government would not seek to re-introduce the 90-day period. She said that if an amendment was put to this effect by another peer, she would reject it.
As a result, the main focus of debate was not detention but the proposals to create a new offence of encouraging terrorism.
Baroness Scotland moved immediately to fend off criticism by noting that this proposal was in Labour’s 2005 manifesto – and by implication, should not be opposed by the Lords.
But Conservative spokesman Lord Kingsland said the proposal appeared to dispense with the premise that for prosecution, a person must have intended to commit a crime.
According to the bill as drafted, a person could be guilty of encouraging terrorism if “he could not reasonably have failed to be aware of that likelihood”.
“There can be no doubt that that imports into the bill a test of negligence, which has no place in our criminal law in relation to an offence of this sort, and we shall be tabling amendments to that effect when we consider this legislation in committee,” Lord Kingsland said.
Lord Hurd, the former Northern Ireland, home and foreign secretary, also expressed his concern with the proposal, saying that it would not help police in catching real terrrorists, only the “loud mouth” clerics – many of whom had good lawyers.
“We need to worry not so much about the loud mouths but about the quiet acts of subversion and training from dangerous people up and down our country, who, on the whole, keep their mouths shut,” he told peers.
He added: “I do not believe that the part of the bill dealing with the glorification of terrorism will make our lives safer.”
Lord Hurd insisted that intelligence, not legislation, was the key to successful counter-terrorism, and warned that this was currently “scanty”, and therefore legislators should be careful of what powers they gave to security forces to act on that intelligence.
Meanwhile, Lord Lloyd, a law lord, also expressed his belief that the new offence of encouragement “must go”, adding: “If it stays in the bill, I predict that it will never see the light of day in a court.”
A clause creating an offence of glorifying terrorism was subsumed into that dealing with encouragement following criticism that it would be unworkable in the courts.
