Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)

My Lords, I am very grateful to everybody who has taken part in this debate. I hope your Lordships would agree that, although this debate has taken over three hours, it has been conducted in precisely the spirit that was discussed in the short debate yesterday and that it has justified taking that time. I said yesterday that I thought we should move more quickly in this process and I believe we will be able to do so in the future. This has been an example of doing so on a very important subject. May I express my grateful thanks to both Front Benches for the way in which they summarised their particular interests in this debate? I thought both were extremely helpful. For those who have seen my noble kinswoman, the Minister, during the year she has been here, I think they will be reassured and understand that she is perfectly capable of erecting Chinese walls that put the Great Wall of China to shame. A point that particularly caught my attention was made by my noble friend Lord Empey. He happens to be a very valued member of a Select Committee of this House that I chair and I can confirm that he is an expert in labyrinths. He is an expert in finding his way out of labyrinths and it is just possible that, from time to time, he is quite good at making labyrinths longer— I hope he takes that in good heart. He raised a question about whether, as he put it, there should be a “special chamber”. It occurs to me that, given that the purpose of my amendments is to ensure that this is a judicial process that falls into our judicial architecture, there may be room for the sort of discussion that we talked about in yesterday’s debate with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer. One might be able to find a hybrid form of what the noble Lord, Lord Empey, and I have proposed that falls within the legal, judicial architecture.