The Times is of course behind a paywall, so you can't access this article unless you're subscribed. Whoops, I reposted it here.
January 25 2011 12:01AM
Control orders lite’ will not make us any safer
Unless we sweep away this authoritarian policy, the radicalisation of Muslims will continue
Theresa May, the Home Secretary, will announce to Parliament tomorrow the conclusion to six months’ deliberation by the Government on its counter-terrorism policy. “Deliberation” is probably too calm a word.
They have had a fierce struggle in Whitehall to defend a series of policies that were denounced by both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats in opposition because they were ineffective, authoritarian and, in some cases, a stain on our national honour.
To her credit, Mrs May has swept away some of the most obviously unwise policies. She has abolished ID cards, curbed the grotesque misuse of “counter-terrorist” stop-and-search and indicated the end of 28 days’ detention without charge.
But the most shameful policy, control orders, has been the most fought over and most fiercely defended. It was created when the courts stopped the government of the day imprisoning suspected foreign terrorists who could not be deported. That was the reason given to Parliament. After a long battle, Parliament grudgingly accepted this but I suspect that it would have been rejected out of hand had it been clear that the policy would be used principally to detain British citizens and British residents. Today all the “controlees” are British.
Why are control orders so terrible? They are a series of measures, many of which — house arrest, internal exile, restrictions on movement and communication — we associate with regimes such as the Soviet Union and South Africa under apartheid. Worst of all, they are imposed after a secret trial process in which the “suspect” is told neither the specific allegation nor the evidence. It would be hard to imagine a procedure that was more of an affront to our judicial traditions.
Out of fewer than fifty “controlees”, seven have escaped. One was reported to have been killed recently in Pakistan. Another turned up at a Liberty AGM and got within close range of the Justice Minister, the future Attorney-General and the head of counter terrorism at Scotland Yard. Had he really been a suicide bomber it would have been the highest-profile hit on government since the Brighton bomb. The public should not believe that just because people are under a control order that they are in any sense under control.
But even beyond the incompetence and illegality of the policy is a hideous Catch 22. Year after year whoever is head of MI5 tells us of the alarming rise in “people of interest”: those sufficiently radicalised to become potential terrorists. The number started at 1,600; they stopped giving a number when it passed 4,000. This growth in the threat, by an astonishing 25per cent a year, is a symptom of a flawed strategy. One reason that radicalisation of Muslims is running so high in Britain is disaffection with policies that appear to victimise them. This is not a minor issue. US Intelligence views radicalised British Muslims as one of the main global terrorist threats.
Heavy-handed measures such as control orders feed recruitment by our enemies and suppress recruitment of friends — as intelligence officers, agents or informers. That makes it difficult to carry out the sort of conventional intelligence gathering that we did in Northern Ireland.
The only way to deal with this is very visibly to sweep away its primary causes, including control orders. A halfway house, or “control order lite”, will not do it. Regrettably that seems to be exactly what we are going to get.
These policies are symptomatic of an attitude among counter-terrorism experts more prevalent here than almost anywhere in the democratic world: a preference for disruption over prosecution. In the US, for example, it is a requirement of federal law that all domestic terrorist cases are pursued to prosecution. In Britain this does not seem to be the case, although we have a 92 per cent success rate when we do take terrorist suspects to court. This would be easier if, like everyone else, we used intercept evidence in court, another policy we appear to balk at.
The greatest single problem with control orders is that they have become a substitute for the judicial process, whose primary aim is to prosecute and put terrorists in prison.
Many of these problems would vanish if control orders were brought within the normal judicial process, as a form of police bail. It is not unusual in criminal proceedings, while the police are collecting evidence, for courts to allow various restraints on suspects — for them to be restricted from associating with other criminals, or to have to stay in the country. This is justifiable as part of prosecuting a crime and because it is part of an open, rather than a shadowy process. We should implement such a procedure for terrorism cases as a replacement for control orders. If we did, nobody could accuse us of dropping our commitment to the rule of law.
I understand that this was rejected in the Counter Terrorism Review. Instead we are likely to see a range of modifications to the policy that, while they are worthwhile, will not resolve the problem. Doing away with house arrest and internal exile, allowing the use of computers and mobile phones, are all valuable improvements, but they will not cut the Gordian knot of our current tangled policy. They will neither return us to the rule of law, nor will they cut the radicalisation of young British Muslims that is the greatest single threat to our safety today.
David Davis is the Conservative MP for Haltemprice and Howden
Which, I think, is all completely correct. The only thing I'd stress in addition is that when the media en masse stressed the judicial anouncements about the supposed seriousness of individual Control Order cases yesterday, they fell for the outrageous misdirection that lies at the heart of the case for Control Orders. In my view, it doesn't matter how serious a judge claims things to be, or how gravely he shakes his head - no assurance from a judicial source should be regarded as an acceptable substitute for a proper trial process. A judge is no substitute for a jury. It is simply never acceptable for the word of a servant of the state to be enough to lock you up - no matter how senior or supposedly well-informed he may be. There has to be an external, verifiable, testable validation process that stands between the state accusing you and incarcerating you - in this country, we have established an excellent system of doing that - it's called a trial.
By Alex Deane
Hat tip: PM
supposed
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