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A bill will be introduced Thursday that allows confidential informants working for MI5 and the police to break the law amid a dispute over whether the commission of crimes such as murder and torture should be explicitly prohibited.
The government says the draft law on covert sources of human intelligence does not amount to a “license to kill” because it will comply with the European convention on human rights, which protects the right to life and prohibits torture.
But a coalition of human rights groups led by Reprieve said they believed there should be clear limits on how far security services or police forces could allow agents working undercover in a terrorist gang to go.
Maya Foa, Director of Reprieve, said: “Our intelligence agencies do vital work to keep this country safe, but there must be common sense limits on the activities of their agents, and we hope that parliamentarians will ensure that these limits are written in the legislation ”.
MI5 has long had a policy allowing its officers and informants to engage in criminal activity if the crimes involved were proportionate to the evidence obtained, but a court ruled in a limited way that it was legal late last year.
As a result, ministers want to put the policy on the statute books for the first time. James Brokenshire, the security minister, said it was a “critical skill” and that it was “important that those with a responsibility to protect the public can continue this work, knowing they have a solid legal foundation.”
The bill, however, does not explicitly rule out any crime, in part because law enforcement agencies want discretion and prevent whistleblowers from being unmasked by terrorists conducting tests to see if they are prepared to commit a crime in a crime. banned list.
Naa’imur Zakariyah Rahman, was jailed for life in 2018 for plotting to assassinate former Prime Minister Theresa May. He was captured after a sting operation in which he was given what he thought was a jacket and backpack filled with explosives.
Government critics point to the 1989 murder of a Belfast lawyer, Pat Finucane, who was shot 14 times in his family’s home in front of his wife and children for loyalists in an attack that was found to involve collusion by the British state, which eventually led to an apology from Prime Minister David Cameron in 2012.
MI5 said it had thwarted 27 right-wing and Islamist terror attacks since 2017 along with the police. “Without the contribution of human agents, make no mistake, many of these attacks would not have been prevented,” said MI5 Director General Ken McCallum.
