practices are of most concern. So far as the courts are concerned, however, the position is different. Generally speaking the court will shut its face against the admission in evidence of any coerced statement (that of a third party is, of course, in any event inadmissible as hearsay); it will, however, admit in evidence the fruit of the poisoned tree. The balance struck here (“a pragmatic compromise” as my noble and learned friend Lord Bingham of Cornhill describes it at para 16 of his opinion) appears plainly from section 76 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. There is, moreover, this too to be said: whereas coerced statements may be intrinsically unreliable, the fruits they yield will have independent evidential value. 162. All this is entirely understandable. As several of your Lordships have observed, the functions and responsibilities of the executive and the judiciary are entirely different, a difference reflected indeed in article 15 of the Torture Convention itself. Article 15’s concern is with the use of “any statement . . . made as a result of torture . . . as evidence in any proceedings”. It creates no bar to the use of coerced statements as a basis for executive action. And, of course, it says nothing whatever about the fruits of the poisoned tree. 163. None of this is contentious. The dispute arising on these appeals concerns only a single, comparatively narrow issue: the use of certain coerced statements on appeals before the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) under section 25 of the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 (the 2001 Act). The statements in question are those made by detainees abroad, coerced by the authorities of a foreign state without the complicity of any British official. It is the Crown’s case that strictly speaking these are admissible in evidence before SIAC, a tribunal charged not with adjudicating upon the appellant’s guilt but only with deciding whether reasonable grounds exist for suspecting him to be an international terrorist and for believing his presence here to be a risk to national security. 164. In common with the other members of this Committee and essentially for the reasons they give, I too would reject the Crown’s contention. In question here is not the power of the executive but rather the integrity of the judicial process. SIAC is a court of law (indeed a superior court of record). And as was pointed out in M v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2004] 2 All ER 863, SIAC’s function on an appeal under section 25 is not to review the exercise by the Secretary of State of his power of certification under section 21, but rather to decide for itself whether, at the time of the hearing, there are -86-