Daily Mail, October 17 2005

According to opponents of the government’s Terrorism Bill, it would plunge us into the horrors of ‘internment’, a ‘police state’ and even — in the words of one elderly former law lord — parallels with Nazi Germany.

Despite the fact that such reactions betray more than a touch of hysteria and irrationality, they reflect a widely shared opposition to the bill. In particular, the judges are squaring up for an epic battle of wills with the government, presenting themselves as the guardians of essential freedoms against ministers who are threatening to destroy them through such proposals as detaining terror suspects for up to 90 days’ questioning.

The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips, has insisted that the judges will not change their approach to terrorism cases and warned the government not to ‘browbeat’ them. The law lord Lord Steyn said that the proposed anti-terrorism powers could violate the Human Rights Act. The Attorney-General — on the rack as ever — has wrung his hands and said he is not yet persuaded that 90 days’ detention is necessary.

The argument is that fundamental liberties are being sacrificed here for no good reason. Disturbingly, this suggests that — even after the July London bombings — influential people still don’t seem to grasp just what we are up against.

Quite simply, the threat posed by Islamist terrorism is so completely different from previous terrorist threats that it requires new attitudes and new procedures to defend ourselves against it. The rules of the game, as the Prime Minister said, have to change.

Earlier this month, a paper published by the Metropolitan Police Anti-Terrorist Branch spelled this out very clearly. In the past, the police waited before making arrests until at or near the point of a terrorist attack, so that they could assemble enough evidence to make the case stand up in court.

But unlike previous terrorists, those threatening us today give no warnings and seek to inflict as many casualties as possible.

So the police can no longer afford to take the risk of waiting. To protect the public, they are therefore forced to arrest suspects well before they have finished their investigations. Given the global nature of the terrorist networks, those investigations can involve inquiries on several continents, involving hundreds of computers and with many different languages to be translated.

In such circumstances, the two-week limit for questioning is clearly absurd. Indeed, it has already posed insuperable difficulties in adequately preparing terrorist cases for trial.

To describe the proposed extension as ‘internment’ or a ‘police state’ is grotesque. Internment is the random and indefinite incarceration of a group of people. What is being proposed, by contrast, is a limited period of detention targeted at individuals in a specific situation.

Despite reports to the contrary the independent terrorism law watchdog, Lord Carlile QC, has supported the case for a 90-day limit. Indeed he underlined how current procedures have left us unprotected when he wrote:

'I am satisfied beyond doubt that there have been situations in which significant conspiracies to commit terrorist acts have gone unprosecuted as a result of the time limitations placed on the control authorities following arrest. This is not in the public interest.'

What he criticises as inadequate is the proposed oversight of such detention by weekly visits to a district judge. Instead, he recommends adopting proposals suggested by the Newton committee in 2003 for a continental-style ‘examining judge’ to supervise the whole investigation, hear submissions from a security-cleared lawyer representing the detained person and with a right of appeal.

Although such a system is foreign to our own legal traditions, it might well provide an acceptable compromise between security and liberty to deal with a phenomenon that lies somewhere in between criminality and war and which therefore requires new structures to deal with it.

Other countries have a less squeamish approach to detaining suspects. The Foreign Office document that tried to make this point backfired when critics pointed out that other countries detain suspects who have not been charged for less time than we do.

But the key point is that after they have been charged they are often detained for far longer while police investigations proceed: in France for up to four years, in Greece for 18 months and in Norway indefinitely with court approval.

The unpalatable fact is that this country has left itself wide open to terrorism. The judges pose as our society’s bulwark against tyranny. But frankly, they are the very last people upon whom we can rely.

For with their obsession with ‘human rights’, it is the judges who have imperilled our safety by turning Britain into a magnet for terrorists and subversives. Through their interpretation of human rights law they have destroyed our border controls so that extremists could pour into the country knowing they would never be pursued.

The judges frustrated all attempts to deal with illegal immigration, thwarted other countries’ desperate attempts to get Britain to extradite terrorist suspects, produced the lunatic situation where people who are a danger to this country cannot be deported in case they may be ill-treated, and when the government tried to lock them up instead to safeguard the public ruled that this too was contrary to human rights law.

‘The real threat to the nation,’ intoned the law lord Lord Hoffmann, ‘comes not from terrorism, but from such laws as these.’ How can such people be entrusted to safeguard our security?

The distressing fact is that, faced with an unprecedented threat from terrorism, it is hard to see just who we can rely on.

The police hardly inspire confidence after pumping bullets into the head of an innocent Brazilian electrician whom they mistook for a suicide bomber.

As for the Government, it does seek a worrying degree of control over people’s lives while failing to get to grips with the country’s problems. To entrust our civil liberties to such incompetent control-freaks is indeed an alarming prospect.

But the judges, who are in the last resort our traditional defenders of freedom, have themselves squandered public trust because of their increasingly perverse and ideological rulings under human rights law which have undermined many of our most fundamental values such as family life, citizenship, equality under the law and even truth itself.

Regardless of this loss of trust in our society’s key institutions, however, we must coolly and clinically assess what we must do to defend ourselves more effectively.

Other countries are far more robust. France has recently thrown out a number of Islamist extremists without demur. Even ultra-liberal Holland is planning to ban the burka in public places — following the example of several towns in Belgium and Italy — because a garment which conceals everything except the eyes obviously makes identification impossible and is therefore an unacceptable security risk.

Yes, liberal values are the bedrock of our society. But equally, a liberal society has to protect itself from being destroyed by the exploitation and abuse of those values.

Of course security has to be balanced against liberty. And the law must be rigorously scrutinised to ensure that it is workable. But with circumstances so changed, the status quo is not an option. Those with their heads stuck in the sand threaten the safety of us all.

Posted by melanie at October 17, 2005