Whither Labour on Civil Liberties?
Post-Blair/Brown Labour hasn’t yet started to define itself coherently, and there were initial fears that new Shadow Home Secretary Ed Balls would use his new (and unlikely) position to attack the ConDems from the right on civil liberties, but he’s hinting the opposite:
Mr Balls, in his first newspaper interview since being appointed shadow home secretary, admitted Labour’s policies under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, which led to failed attempts to get Parliament to pass laws to permit suspects to be detained without charge for 90 and 42 days, had been a mistake.“Even 42 days was a step too far,” he said.“Our reputation as a party which protected liberty as well as security suffered as a result.“Our approach should always be that if the evidence shows we can go down from 28 days without impeding the police and security services from doing their jobs, then we ought to do it.”
“They are such exceptional measures that in an ideal world of course we would want to manage without them.”Labour would be prepared to consider alternative methods, such as a combination of covert surveillance and travel restrictions, he added.His comments come at a tricky time for Labour, with the party gripped by renewed in-fighting during the two-week paternity leave taken by party leader, Ed Miliband.Mr Balls said: “I’m quite clear we must always strike a balance between protecting our country from the risks of terrorist attacks on the one hand, and preserving our democratic freedoms and fundamental liberties on the other: it should never be a case of one or the other.”
Balls was also on The Andrew Marr Show this morning, where he fleshed out his position. He reaffirmed his support for a 14-day limit but warned that the coalition was “way too” liberal on CCTV and the DNA database.
The Freedom Bill Can’t Come Soon Enough
The ConDemNation coalition is comprised of numerous contradictions, any of which could ultimately become its undoing. But this isn’t a blog post about the public finances or making up constitutional reforms on the fly, this is about the Freedom Bill, or the Great Repeal Bill, whichever it turns out to be. The government has made it perfectly clear that rolling back the authoritarian abuses of the New Labour years would be one of its priorities, yet two problems have already arisen – one in asylum and immigration, the other with control orders.
Children of asylum seekers continue to be held at the Dungavel detention centre despite a coalition promise to end the practice.
A Pakistani woman, Sehar Shebaz, and her eight-month-old daughter Wanya were detained after reporting to officials in Glasgow on Monday.
A spokesman for the immigration minister Damian Green said the current system must stay in place for now.
He said the Home Office had to consult on a replacement.
I can’t help but wonder whether, because this was a Liberal Democrat policy, there was no plan devised on how to prevent children of ‘failed’ asylum seekers being incarcerated. After all the likelihood was they wouldn’t be in government, yet here we are. I don’t understand to this day why ‘failed’ asylum seekers (and Blair jury rigged the system early last decade to make sure there were a lot more of them) should be incarcerated – I really don’t – and simply not locking any of them up would be the most humane solution. After all ‘failed’ asylum seekers haven’t been convicted of a crime. But seeing as that’s hardly likely to happen under a Tory-led government, we’ll have to wait and see on the replacement Green comes up with.
Pakistanis Abid Naseer and Ahmed Faraz Khan, both 23, who were detained by police as part of Operation Pathway in the north-west of England in April last year, took their cases to the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (Siac) in London. The commission today upheld their appeals.
However, Channel 4 News has learned that both men will now be subject to control orders, restrictions signed by the home secretary for the purpose of “protecting members of the public from a risk of terrorism”.
The Liberal Democrats’ Freedom Bill explicitly repeals the inhuman practice of control orders, with the logical assumption that our courts can handle the challenges of modern terrorism and the presumption that the rule of law is paramount. As the Lib Dems’ website puts it:
We should put our trust in them [courts & criminal justice system] and not rely on something as unfair as labelling people terrorists and subjecting them to a range of draconian punishments without ever charging them or trying them.
And that’s the point here. Where’s the evidence? Where’s the fair trial to prove their guilt? How can we live with a system which declares someone a terrorist in secret, and without the right of reply, and then confines them to house arrest? It may very well be true that both men are indeed terrorists, but I’d much rather live in a society that tried them on the same terms as everyone else; to suggest Islamic terror suspects are somehow different is palpably absurd after all. It’s all well and good that the new government has changed policy on ID cards and other, perhaps easier civil liberties issues to tackle, but it’s already time to put its money where its mouth is on others.
Control Orders on the Way Out?
Control orders appear to be on their way out, after becoming victims of their own twisted logic:
Most of the remaining control orders imposed on terror suspects are expected to be revoked following the decision by the home secretary, Alan Johnson, to free a man with Libyan and British nationality after three years under virtual house arrest.
The control order imposed on the man, known only as AF, was withdrawn last week as his lawyers prepared for a court hearing at which Johnson would have been forced to disclose the secret intelligence case against him.
The decision followed a landmark law lords ruling in June that it was unlawful to use “secret evidence” to place restrictions, including a 16-hour curfew, on terror suspects who had never been charged or tried in open court.
The unanimous ruling by nine judges, led by the senior law lord, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, opened the way for the 20 suspects on control orders to launch fresh legal challenges demanding to know the nature of the allegations against them.
This abuse of habeas corpus was one of the most disgusting pieces of legislation of the entire New Labour project. It’s a fundamental tenet of our way of life that you can’t lock anyone up without laying down a charge against them and providing evidence to back up that charge. Yet the state deemed it acceptable to control people’s movements, to inhibit their freedom, to limit their possessions and restrict their ability to communicate because they ‘couldn’t be prosecuted in court’ for fear of ‘revealing secret intelligence’. So they were ‘terror suspects’, so what? Habeas corpus has never been restricted by race, religion, gender or social class; to suggest that the law and judicial system couldn’t cope with certain individuals because of their race, religion or political affiliations was always illogical at best, deeply racist at worst. And refusing even to pass the evidence held against suspects to their lawyers was a huge violation of human rights as laid down by the Universal Declaration and the European Convention on Human Rights. Now the justification of ‘secret evidence’ has been thrown out, control orders seem likely to pass into one of the murkiest eras of modern British history. Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty said:
“Whilst some people have been driven quite mad by years of punishment without trial, suspects are allowed to wander through densely populated public spaces and many have disappeared. Those responsible for this policy should be thoroughly ashamed for creating so much injustice for so little security in return.”
