Intelligence experts give evidence to Parliamentary Committee

20 October 2014

Professor Anthony Glees and Dr Julian Richards were invited to give evidence to Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee, chaired by Sir Malcolm Rifkind QC, who are conducting an inquiry into the balance between security and privacy.

Fellow witnesses were Rt Hon David Blunkett, former Home Secretary, and Baroness Onora O’Neill at the committee meeting at Portcullis House.

Professor Glees said: “In my view you can have security without liberty but you can’t have liberty without security: the UK needs a strong and effective intelligence community, able to deliver security both to the people of this country but also to our pluralistic liberal democratic way of life.

“Our secret agencies have been tasked by us with doing precisely this, it is set out for them in statutes, in 1989 and 1994, and we must give the tools they reckon they need in order to do the job. They do this lawfully and most efficiently.

“I think that on the whole they’ve done a great job and we have an intelligence community in the UK that is amongst the very best in the world. However, everything I say is predicated on the UK continuing to abide by the European Convention on Human Rights. Today, however, we not only have a strong UKIP (UKIP are committed to immediate withdrawal from the ECHR) but at the Conservative Party Conference the Home Secretary announced that the Party would leave the ECHR.

“I also said that whilst security in a liberal democracy is an absolute value, I don’t believe that privacy is. Indeed the European Convention allows national security to trump every right except the right to life – and I agree with that too, I don’t think we want our security community killing people in the UK who threaten us and they don’t want that either!”