LONDON, 12 October 2005 — British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Home Secretary Charles Clarke yesterday vigorously defended the government’s controversial proposed anti-terror bill that is currently being debated by the House of Commons. Blair backed police calls for powers to hold terror suspects without charge for three months, a plan civil liberties groups have attacked as draconian.
Clarke in a heated exchange with the Commons Home Affairs Committee earlier yesterday said that it was important to hold people “absolutely determined to engage in terrorist acts”. But again in a hint of compromise, he said the 90-day period was “not God-given” and that he had sought to be “flexible” and gain “consensus” with other parties.
On Sunday in a BBC Panorama program, two distinguished peers, Lord Steyn, a former Law Lord, and Lord Lloyd of Berwick, who carried out the inquiry into terrorist legislation for the Conservative government in 1995-96, attacked the proposed measures and legislation to combat terrorism and extremism as “intolerable” and probably unlawful.
Yesterday Blair rejected such criticism by judges of the government’s proposed terror plans: “All I’m saying to the judiciary is be aware there’s a proper role for the judiciary and a proper role for Parliament.”
However, Lord Phillips, the new Lord Chief Justice in England and Wales who took over from Lord Wolfe on Oct. 1, also joined the fray yesterday warning politicians not to interfere with the judiciary or browbeat judges.
“Occasionally one does feel that an individual politician is trying to browbeat the judiciary, and for such an individual I would say that browbeating is wholly inappropriate. We’re all trying to do our jobs to the best of our abilities. “I’m taking up this office at a time when it’s said in various quarters that judges are in conflict with government. They are not. Judges are in conflict with no one, The judiciary has a clearly defined role, which is to apply the law as laid down by Parliament,” he told the BBC.
Prime Minister Blair also denied criticism from opposition parties and civil liberties groups that he was “authoritarian” and stressed that “this is what we need to make this country safe. I care deeply about the civil liberties of this country...but most about one basic civil liberty, which is the right to life of our citizens and freedom from terrorism.”
The Metropolitan Police, he added, had provided good evidence for extending this period — such as the complex nature of terror cases, which involved gathering large amounts of evidence. Terrorism and its activities are “of a wholly different order today than any before. We need to make sure therefore that we give ourselves every possible opportunity to prevent such terrorist acts occurring.”
