Lord Anderson of Ipswich (CB)

My Lords, I add a few comments in support of the noble Lord, Lord Pannick—but without repeating him—on the proposed ouster clause suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, in his Amendments 421 and 422DA. The schedule of proscribed organisations is often added to and rarely subtracted from. At present it has about 98 entries, if you include Northern Ireland as well as the rest of the world. That includes a number of nationalist movements from around the world that are, or have in the past been, committed to violence in pursuit of their aims. Despite the recommendations of successive Independent Reviewers of Terrorism Legislation, the annual review of proscribed groups by the Home Office and the NIO was discontinued in 2014. As far as I know, that automatic annual review has not been reinstated. There is no requirement in law that proscription should have to be renewed every three or five years, or indeed at all. In my report on the Terrorism Acts in 2016, at paragraph 5.24, I recorded the Government’s admission, which I found breathtaking, that no fewer than 14 groups on the list no longer satisfied the statutory requirements for proscription. Even more breathtakingly, they did not try to stop me saying it. There were almost certainly other groups in respect of which the same thing could have been argued, yet most of those groups remain on the list. One group, the al-Qaeda offshoot to which the current President of Syria belonged, was recently deproscribed on the initiative of the Home Secretary. But if an application to the Home Secretary is turned down, it then takes money and determination to challenge a proscription in POAC—the tribunal that exists for this purpose. A handful of applications have been made by organisations that have definitively rejected violence, and these have been successful. With great respect to the noble Lord and without reference to the Palestine Action case, I am not persuaded that there is any good reason to block this necessary avenue for recourse.