Countering state threats
Ministers will take powers to ban state-backed groups in the UK
New powers will be created to counter threats from states such as Iran, the home secretary told MPs yesterday.
Yvette Cooper had commissioned a report from Jonathan Hall KC, the independent reviewer of terrorism and state threat legislation, which said that parliament had never intended the Terrorism Act 2000 to apply to state entities. Although some anti-terrorism powers could be used against state-backed groups such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, there were now gaps that needed to be filled.
She continued:
We are committed to taking forward Mr Hall’s recommendations and… we will draw up new powers, modelled on counter-terrorism powers, in a series of areas to tackle state threats.
Crucially, I can tell the house that we will create a new power of proscription to cover state threats — a power that is stronger than the current National Security Act powers in allowing us to restrict the activity and operations of foreign state-backed organisations in the UK — including new criminal offences for individuals who invite support for or promote the group in question.
Hall had recommended that the home secretary should have a new power to issue what he called a statutory alert and liability threat notice — a “SALT notice” — against a foreign intelligence service.
“I make no observations on whether it should be exercised against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps,” the reviewer added. But issuing a SALT notice might make it harder for such groups to operate in the UK.
“Naming and shaming in a high-profile manner, accompanied by open reasons, can help address attempts at plausible deniability for serious harm caused to the UK or its allies,” Hall said in his report.
Cordons might be erected to exclude the public from areas being searched by the police for foreign-power threat activity, he added. Areas at risk of attack, such as the television station previously operated by opponents of the Iranian regime, might be cordoned off to protect them.
In further comments last night, Hall explained how foreign powers operated in the UK. Delivering a lecture in memory of the Northern Ireland prosecutor John Creaney QC at the think tank Policy Exchange, he said:
Young people who might once have been attracted to a terrorist cause are now willing to carry out sabotage for Putin’s Russia. They are recruited in exactly the same way, by groups operating on [the encrypted massaging app] Telegram…
Some state threat actors are willing to take extraordinary risks, in ways as irrational and incomprehensible as building bombs in their kitchens. Take, for example, Daniel Khalife, the soldier who was determined to spy for Iran and later broke out of prison.
The National Security Act 2023, referred to by the home secretary, has replaced the Official Secrets Acts of 1911, 1920 and 1939. Cooper told MPs that three Iranians had been charged under the new legislation at the weekend.
She added:
All three have been charged with engaging in conduct likely to assist a foreign intelligence service. Additional charges were brought in relation to engaging in conduct, including surveillance, reconnaissance and open research, with the intention to commit acts of serious violence against a person in the United Kingdom.
The foreign state to which these charges relate is Iran and those individuals are the first Iranian nationals to be charged under the National Security Act.
The three defendants had entered the UK illegally between 2016 and 2022. Their targets are alleged to have been journalists at Iran International, an independent television channel with offices in London
Successive UK governments have been keen to maintain diplomatic relations with Iran. That enabled the government to summon the Iranian ambassador to the foreign office yesterday in response to the charges.
Whether diplomatic relations could survive a move to proscribe the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps under the proposed new legislation remains to be seen.
SO sorry: I ought to have said that the particular bomb threatened Gathering at Villepinte was on the last day of June in 2018. Apart from many, many others, there were as I recall without detailed references before me at least FIVE Law Society Past Presidents and a handful of senior Society spokespersons such as myself. The gatherings nonetheless have continued both in Paris and for a time near Tirana in Albania where the 3,00 or so Camp Ashraf II dissidents and designated refugees in mortal danger whilst located in Baghdad had been given sanctuary by the Tirana regime. Again, therefore, I have both a philosophical and personal stake in all of this, especially since I had persuaded those Law Society stalwarts to attend!
It's all very interesting. I found Hall's inclusion of "separatism" in his risk analysis odd. It's half a century since the Tartan Army's minor incursion outside Perth and people coming home to a real fire in Wales. He seems to be hinting at action against peaceful supporters of Scottish and Welsh independence. And I find his "I make no comment" comment far too transparently, unsubtly, 'hey, I'm a clever lawyer, look what I did there'. And I think the whole combo of putting out his coming speech in full then making the speech to the carefully chosen Policy Exchange all a bit too centring of himself. So there.