“reasonable grounds” for the suspicion and belief required under section 21. True it is that the statements in question are sought to be relied upon not to convict the appellant of any offence but rather to found such suspicion and belief as would justify his continued detention under section 23. It is difficult to see, however, why this consideration should strengthen rather than weaken the Crown’s argument: no court will readily lend itself to indefinite detention without charge, let alone trial. (Parliament, indeed, has recently demonstrated its own unease in this area by refusing to legislate for up to 90 days detention of arrested terrorist suspects prior to charge.) At all events, for the detention to continue under the 2001 Act, Parliament required that SIAC must independently sanction this deprivation of liberty. 165. In short, I would hold that SIAC could never properly uphold a section 23 detention order where the sole or decisive evidence supporting it is a statement established to have been coerced by the use of torture. To hold otherwise would be, as several of your Lordships have observed, to bring British justice into disrepute. And this is so notwithstanding that the appellant was properly certified and detained by the Secretary of State in the interests of national security, notwithstanding that the legislation (now, of course, repealed) allowed the appellant’s continuing detention solely on the ground of suspicion and belief, notwithstanding that the incriminating coerced statement was made not by the appellant himself but by some third party, and notwithstanding that it was made abroad and without the complicity of any British official. 166. To what extent, it is perhaps worth asking, does such a ruling impede the executive in its vitally important task of safeguarding the country so far as possible against terrorism? To my mind to a very limited extent indeed. In the first place it is noteworthy that the ruling will merely substitute an exclusionary rule of evidence for the Secretary of State’s own publicly stated policy not in any event to rely on evidence which he knows or believes to have been obtained by torture abroad. Secondly, the intelligence case against the suspect would, we are told, ordinarily consist of material from a large number of sources— a “mosaic” or “jigsaw” of information as it has been called; it is most unlikely that the sole or decisive evidence will be a coerced statement. It follows, therefore, that the possibility of a detention order under section 23 being discharged on a section 25 appeal to SIAC because of the rejection of a coerced statement is comparatively remote. And certainly there is nothing in SIAC’s open determination in relation to E’s appeal (the first in which Mr Emmerson QC submitted that -87-