FRFI 164 December 2001 / January 2002
‘Everyone in this country will need to back, and should back, the measures that we are taking – we are protecting them and their families as well as our own.’
‘If…we do not rise to the challenge and provide through our democratic institutions the commitment and will to face down terrorists, our economy, social well-being and quality of life will suffer. The legislative measures which I have outlined today will protect and enhance our rights, not diminish them.’
‘There is no immediate intelligence pointing to a specific threat to the United Kingdom…’
David Blunkett, Home Secretary, speech to Parliament 15 October 2001
Britain already has the most far-reaching and draconian anti-terrorist laws in Europe. Now, under the guise of protecting British citizens against some vague, post-11 September threat of ‘terrorist activity’, Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett has announced yet stricter controls, and is planning to reintroduce internment, which was last used in the Gulf War to detain Iraqis and Palestinians, and used in 1971 to arbitrarily imprison thousands of Irish nationalists, the majority of whom were entirely uninvolved in the armed struggle.
The new Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Bill consists of a wide range of anti-democratic measures, which increase the powers of the police and state to a terrifying degree. Most attention has been paid to the internment plans, as these involve derogation (opting-out) of Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which outlaws arbitrary detention; however there are also a wide range of other measures in the Bill. As always in such circumstances, the majority of these are powers the government was waiting to introduce, and for which the 11 September attack provides a convenient justification. They include powers to:
• remove by force masks or ‘disguises’, if it is suspected that a crime may be committed in the vicinity of the disguised person (not necessarily by them) – non-compliance is punishable by one month’s imprisonment;
• keep the fingerprints of all asylum seekers on file, including those given refugee status;
• obtain and store all communications data, including logs of e-mails;
• freeze alleged ‘terrorist assets’;
• enact European legislation on cross-border policing, European arrest warrants etc without British parliamentary debate.
The internment proposals are viciously discriminatory and xenophobic. They apply only to foreign nationals, who will be able to be locked up indefinitely, without being charged with any crime, on the basis that they are ‘suspected international terrorists’. Blunkett claims that this is ‘not internment [as] these detainees would be free to leave the country’. As the internees are likely to almost exclusively be asylum seekers fleeing political persecution, this statement is both ridiculous and offensive. In fact, the whole rationale Blunkett has used to justify detention is that many such people cannot be deported, as the risk of doing so would breach Article 3 of the ECHR. Article 3 is even more fundamental than Article 5, and prohibits exposing anyone to torture or ‘inhuman or degrading treatment’. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have both criticised the Bill, with Amnesty saying that ‘It is a violation of fundamental human rights to detain people on grounds of national security, who the authorities do not intend to prosecute and who cannot be deported. Anyone so detained should be charged promptly with a recognisable criminal offence and tried within a reasonable period.’
While previous legislation, even including the draconian Terrorism Act 2000, generally expects there to be ‘reasonable grounds for suspicion’ that someone is actually guilty of some crime, the new Bill not only allows the Home Secretary to lock up foreigners on the basis of what they might think of doing in the future, but also permits him to do so on the basis of ‘suspicion’ and ‘belief’ alone. The ridiculously wide definition of a terrorist set out in the Terrorism Act is also extended still further, to the degree where ‘international terrorist’ includes ‘a person who has links with a person who is a member of or belongs to an international terrorist group’. Such ‘links’ are not defined and there is no insistence that the linked person knows of the ‘terrorist group’ member’s affiliation, or that the member is engaged in any activity beyond membership. The Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association briefing on the Bill points out that the definition is wide enough to encompass ‘Anyone attending the Halkevi Community Centre or any of the many MPs who picketed the South African Embassy on Friday nights campaigning against apartheid in support of the ANC’. As the MPs are British citizens, they are safe, which leaves the Kurdish and Turkish men and women drinking tea in the Halkevi Community Centre, who cannot fail to have known at some point in their lives members of the now banned Kurdish liberation movement, the PKK.
The day after the parliamentary debate on the Bill, The Guardian proclaimed ‘MPs savage terror bill’, and two days later it trumpeted ‘Labour revolt on terror bill’. This was sheer deceit from the paper whose readers were criticised in the debate as ‘yoghurt-eating, muesli-eating’ liberal do-gooders, concerned for the human rights of the perpetrators of terrorism, but caring nothing for the victims. Blunkett is not under the ‘severe pressure to dilute’ the Bill, which The Guardian claims him to be, and only four Labour MPs actually voted against it at its second reading. The ‘stormy debate’ was hot air, the pretence of a democratic process, which resulted in Blunkett ‘conceding’ that unless a new Bill was tabled the legislation would lapse after five years, and promising to slightly amend the definition of ‘links’ and add the word ‘reasonable’ to the ‘suspicion’ on which an ‘international terrorist’ can be detained. In doing this, he avoided responding to the concerns of the Liberal Democrats that the entire process of ‘certificating’ a ‘suspected terrorist’ can only be scrutinised by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) and cannot be judicially reviewed in the same way as other ministerial decisions. This deprives internees of any court hearing on their case other than the SIAC one, which may be held in the absence of the internee or his legal representative, and which may consider information which is never disclosed to the person concerned.
This Bill is once again about inclusion and exclusion. Inside the cosy ring are ‘families’ and the ‘economy’ – outside are the peoples of an ‘alien culture’ which Thatcher talked about in the early 1980s, the ‘international terrorists’ who threaten ‘our’ way of life by their very existence. All those who oppose the imperialist war in Afghanistan and who are fighting against racism in Britain must come together to fight this latest attack on all our civil liberties and must support, defend and fight for the freedom of everyone who is interned.
Nicki Jameson
