LONDON, 26 March 2004 — Anyone can be a terrorist, and one terrorist can cause the deaths of hundreds of people. It is essential that each one is tracked down and brought to justice. In Britain the Home Office has been trying to do just that.
The various anti-terror laws introduced in Britain attempt to round up prospective terrorists. In an extension to the 1980s Prevention of Terrorism Act and the Terrorism Act of 2000, the emergency Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act (2001) allows the British government to exercise a higher degree of state power in relation to terrorist suspects. The controversial act allows the police to detain individuals, without trial, for indefinite periods of time. It strips British society of fundamental civil liberties that took centuries to develop and undermines European obligations on human rights and British asylum policies.
Although the law is limited to “terrorists and those who assist terrorists”, the definitions in the act are ambiguous and vague leaving space for misuse. The act provides for a “reverse onus”, where detainees must prove their innocence instead of the state having to prove their guilt. In a country that long stood by the principle that everyone is innocent until proven guilty, everyone is now becoming suspect.
Lawyers have called the new Home Office measures a “complete false emergency”. It is true, as Home Secretary David Blunkett pointed out in his speech at Harvard Law School earlier this month, that terrorists abuse individual rights and freedoms. However, what Blunkett conveniently forgot to mention is the government’s abuse of civil liberties when a country begins to take the shape of a police state — by detaining innocent people without charge, and arresting anybody the authorities might think is suspicious. After Sept. 11 it seems we have all worked to make this world a nastier place. First we attacked and destroyed lives in Afghanistan. Then we did the same thing in Iraq as we bombed and destroyed people’s homes and families. While all that was happening we locked hundreds of people away at Guantanamo Bay — it must be remembered that all of them are innocent until proven guilty — and without any trials or access to lawyers we took away their rights, civil and human.
In the Third World governments have difficulty tracking down potential threats due to the small number of people that have passports or other identification. In Britain we are already so “known” by the state that a simple search of public records updates the Ministry of Information on who we are, where we live, what we do and even where we are at any moment in time. We have the most advanced spies in the world, satellite technology enables us to be tracked down wherever we are, and it seems that despite all this surveillance our home secretary still doesn’t know who we are.
If a developed country like Britain cannot rely on its intelligence service to keep informed of prospective terrorists then which country can? It seems British visions of human rights have blurred. While the Blair government uses human rights as its grounds for military intervention in Afghanistan, former Yugoslavia and Iraq, it neglects human rights at home with its anti-terror laws. Given that we were lied to about the whole war in Iraq, what assurance do we have that our government will not abuse these laws?
It took Prime Minister Tony Blair two years to bring home five innocent British men from Guantanamo Bay, yet there are others left with no guarantee of release in Cuba and in prisons across the UK. Belmarsh and Woodhill prisons in Britain house at least 14 men who have been detained on the basis of evidence that neither they nor their lawyers have seen. So how can these measures be abused? Well, police will arrest anybody they want to. After all, none of us will be allowed to see the evidence — it’s all “classified information”. In addition, the system provides no room for juries, thus undermining the notion of fair trials. What kind of a message are we sending across the world? Al-Qaeda instilled fear in public life and now the Blair government is instilling fear in our private lives.
