Authoritarian populism is being stoked up by the current Tory government as it paves the way for scrapping the Human Rights Act (HRA). This is finding its worst expressions in the targeting and scapegoating of the most disempowered groups, such as ‘illegal migrants’ and prisoners, whose dehumanisation renders them unworthy of even the most basic human rights. JOHN BOWDEN writes.
Without waiting to finish analysing the responses to its phony consultation exercise on ‘reforming’ the HRA, on 10 May 2022 the government announced via the Queen’s Speech that it would be bringing in a Bill of Rights to ‘restore the balance of power between the legislature and the courts’. This essentially means that the limited protections afforded by the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which has formed a part of domestic British law under the HRA since 2000, will be scrapped.
The targeting and dehumanisation of a specific marginalised group to encourage public support for the abandonment of the HRA was exemplified by Justice Secretary Dominic Raab on 27 April when he focused his racist wrath on imprisoned Muslims. Raab claimed prisoners were using the ECHR to prevent the authorities stopping the spread of Islamic radicalisation within prisons by the use of solitary confinement in specially constructed control units.
Two types of such ‘prisons within prisons’ currently exist within the high security system: Close Supervision Centres (CSC) have been in operation since 1998 and Separation Centres (SC) since 2017. Raab announced plans to construct two further such units at a cost of £7.3m, claiming that this was in response to a report by Jonathan Hall QC, the government’s Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, alleging that ‘Muslim prison gangs’ have effectively taken over some prisons and turned them into breeding grounds for Islamic terrorism. Raab said that the only effective way of stopping ‘the most dangerous radicalising recruiters’ was to totally isolate them within control units, lest they ‘poison the well … if they’re left in general population, and … ultimately recruit more terrorists’.
Raab said he intends to significantly increase the capacity of such prison isolation units, despite CSCs being condemned by a range of organisations as places of psychological torture. They will undoubtedly be used disproportionately against Muslim prisoners. In 2021 the Prisons Inspectorate described CSC regimes as ‘the most restrictive, with limited stimuli and human contact’, and Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, has said that ‘exposing prisoners to prolonged and indefinite periods of isolation is mental torture’. Melzer also said that ‘when used for more than 15 consecutive days, these conditions of detention amount to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment and, therefore, are neither legitimate nor lawful’. Amnesty International UK has previously described CSCs as ‘akin to cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment’.
Raab said that replacing the HRA with a Bill of Rights will limit the ability of prisoners confined to CSCs and SCs to use the ECHR to bring ‘trivial’ claims against their treatment, and will ‘stop the legal attrition that we are already starting to see with terrorist and extremist prisoners claiming the right to socialise within prisons, when they actually want to radicalise other prisoners’.
Raab told right-wing LBC presenter Nick Ferrari: ‘We must not allow religious or cultural sensitivities – as important as they are – to deter us from clamping down and nipping in the bud early the precursor signs of radicalisation. That can be things like the step from eating halal, which of course we want to respect, to requiring others in their wings or kitchens to follow Sharia rules.’
Racism has always played a major part in the selection of prisoners for the CSC system, and Islamophobia has overtly been the rationale for decisions to place them in SCs, reflecting the deep institutionalised racism of the criminal justice system in Britain. A 2021 breakdown of the ethnicity of CSC prisoners revealed that 50% were black and minority ethnic, as opposed to 27% of the prison population as a whole. A 2015 report by the Prison Reform Trust found that 50% of CSC prisoners were Muslim, although Muslims made up 16% of the general prison population.
The ECHR has never been an ideal mechanism for the defence of prisoners’ rights but the removal now of any semblance of legal accountability will leave prisoners entirely at the mercy of those who enforce the system. As always, it is the most marginalised and disempowered groups in capitalist society on whom the state focuses its greatest cruelty. As the international capitalist crisis deepens and social unrest is increasingly criminalised, the reach of the carceral state will extend into the lives of the growing ranks of the poor, which is why resistance is so vitally important now.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 288, June/July 2022
