Blunkett’s Proposals are in Contempt of Justice, the Rule of Law and Human Rights

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Blunkett’s Proposals are in Contempt of Justice, the Rule of Law and Human Rights

Home Secretary's Reported Proposals -- an Aberration of Justice, the Rule of Law and Human Rights

In Terror of Blunkett's Security Measures

This covert experiment in injustice:
Blunkett's Proposals for Secret Trials Will Shame the Country

In this issue we report on three statements condemning the Home Secretary’s proposals to further enshrine arbitrary authority in law. The pretext is the "war against terrorism", but the proposals, along with the Civil Contingencies Bill and the so-called "anti-terrorism" Acts already in force, criminalise sections of society, as well as those who dissent and protest politically against the state. They are directed against the people as a whole in a situation where their political will is increasingly in contradiction with the state power.

As the statement of Amnesty International stresses, these measures would dispense with justice, attack the rule of law and violate human rights human rights. WDIE joins its voice to all those forces protesting against these measures, and calls on everyone to take a stand against them, and ensure they and the Civil Contingencies Bill do not succeed. The people themselves have a right to decide what security measures are appropriate, the government must be accountable to them. The "anti-terrorism" legislation and measures must be thrown out. They are a reflection domestically of occupation and aggression abroad, and underline the urgency of the movement for the renewal of democracy and political life.

News Release Issued by the International Secretariat of Amnesty International, 2 February, 2004

Amnesty International is extremely concerned at the Home Secretary's suggestions for new measures to "combat terrorism". If implemented, these measures would dispense with justice, the rule of law and human rights in the UK.

"Instead of further undermining the rule of law and human rights, the UK authorities should start to pay attention to the concerns currently being expressed by people and organisations from many different walks of life."

"Eminent religious leaders and members of the legal profession in the UK have repeatedly criticised the serious human rights violations that have taken place in the context of the UK authorities' response to the 11 September 2001 attacks."

"These measures have already created a small-scale Guantanamo Bay in the UK by allowing the continuing detention of 14 foreign nationals without charge or trial."

"Any plans to extend these measures to UK citizens must be resisted."

Amnesty International has consistently called for:

· The UK government to repeal Part 4 of the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 (ATCSA), which allows for indefinite detention without charge or trial

· Individuals held under the Act to either be charged and tried in proceedings that meet international fair trial standards, or to be released.

The Newton Committee, the Committee of Privy Counsellors, who had been charged with reviewing the ATCSA, has already recommended the urgent repeal of the ATCSA powers allowing non-UK nationals to be detained potentially indefinitely. It is therefore particularly disconcerting that the Home Secretary is reportedly suggesting the introduction of wider internment-like measures.

Shami Chakrabarti, Director of Liberty and Executive Governor of the British Institute of Human Rights, argued in the Guardian on Tuesday, February 3, that the Home Secretary's proposals to combat terrorism are more in tune with dictatorship than a "free" society.

She writes: What bitter irony. Messrs Bush and Blair begin to react to widespread concerns about the intelligence that led us to war. Simultaneously, Mr Blunkett contemplates criminal convictions and endless incarceration on the basis of secret intelligence alone.

What is to be left of democracy or the rule of law in such a topsy-turvy world? No juries? No presumption of innocence? No defence lawyers or trials held in public? Phrases such as "pre-emptive detention" and "vetted judges" are chilling indeed. All this in a "war against terror" waged in the name of our freedom.

Shami Chakrabarti says: Let us remember that we already have the broadest and toughest special terror laws in Europe. There is extended pre-charge detention in terror cases and security service evidence may enjoy public interest immunity. The home secretary has powers to proscribe organisations (whose members may be prosecuted). There are offences covering funding, inciting and conspiring to terrorism and offences relating to possessing material with terrorist intentions.

Chief constables (with the home secretary's approval) designate whole cities and counties for stop and search without even suspicion (if "expedient to preventing terrorism"). The entire Metropolitan police area appears to have been so designated on a rolling basis since February of 2001. These designations are made in secret (with no judicial or even parliamentary warrant) and the powers used to harass peace protesters.

Further, the home secretary has led the United Kingdom to derogate from the right against arbitrary detention (Article 5 of the Convention on Human Rights). The UK is the only European country to have done this. Under his 2001 Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act, in a poignant echo of the law-free zone that is Guantanamo Bay, 14 foreign national suspects have been detained with neither charge nor trial for well over two years.

The Home Office has conceded that this detention may be based on intelligence obtained by torture around the world.

Shami Chakrabarti concludes her article: One final irony. Are we entering an age when the prime work of lawyers and judges will be in manning public enquiries into essentially political scandals? Are we similarly entering an age when criminal convictions are to be obtained at the will of politicians?

By Gareth Peirce*, Wednesday February 4, 2004, The Guardian

In the course of 12 months, 13 years ago, more than 20 innocent Irish men and women were branded "terrorists" and convicted by English courts.

That the evidence was false was known only to the accused and their accusers. For the accusers, even that clarity undoubtedly became blurred, since in their minds the means – twisting and coercing evidence – justified the ends: combating terrorism. Brutality, falsification, exaggeration of scientific evidence, concealment of prosecution evidence and of intelligence pointing in a different direction was the order of the day.

So is it possible that the Home Office is suffering from collective amnesia? What lessons should any home secretary have learnt from these terrible cases? David Blunkett, adopting the same dangerous justification of the means justifying the end, this week proposes trials based on evidence that will never see the light of day, the abolition of juries, substitution by judges, and a reversal of the burden of proof so that suspicion is enough.

The eventual revelation that so many innocent people had been buried alive in English jails was a shaming exercise for the country. Lessons, it was said then, must be learnt. And anyway, those were crude times, when investigators might have resorted to brutality.

Also in question was the ability of the judiciary to correct those injustices. But the judiciary – which Blunkett now proposes to substitute for juries where the issue is terrorism – for decades showed itself as seriously wanting. In the cases of the more than 20 innocent men and women, at least 30 senior judges had come to wrong and unjust conclusions, even where – as happened in the case of the Birmingham and Guildford appeals – they saw evidence that would have driven any jury to acquit. In the Birmingham appeal, for example, a master plan for fabrication of police interviews in the handwriting of the senior officer in charge of interrogation caused the court of appeal only to comment that they did not think that the officer had the brains to orchestrate a conspiracy.

For the Guildford defendants, extraordinary evidence was put before their appeal court. Members of the IRA who had, in fact, carried out the bombings for which the four young defendants had been convicted were prepared to provide compelling detail of their role. Instead of quashing the convictions, the court of appeal returned the four innocent defendants to prison for another 13 years.

There were only two honourable exceptions, seen as critical in guarding against future injustice. The court of appeal, considering the case of Judith Ward, by then imprisoned for more than 18 years, thundered that it would not permit "trial by ambush" in this country. What the prosecution knew, the defence should know.

Equally authoritatively came the voice of Lord Devlin, who saw with a clear eye that juries – constitutionally the arbiters of fact – could not find a substitute in the judiciary. When judges attempted, as happened in appeal after appeal, to consider fresh evidence as if they were a jury, they were committing a constitutional sin in addition to the fact that they then went on to demonstrate grotesque incomprehension, of the evidence on which they were commenting.

Those voicing concerns about these new proposals should be aware that they are the second part of an experiment that has been ongoing for the past two years, largely without protest. A number of men, all foreign nationals, have been locked up indefinitely without trial on the basis of the suspicion only of the home secretary that they have links with terrorism.

The suggestion that I and other lawyers are representing them is in itself a travesty; neither they nor we know the evidence against them. We know only that it is claimed to be in large part based upon "intelligence", and this is why – it is argued – the men cannot be prosecuted in a trial with mandatory safeguards before the only tribunal, of fact allowed to consider criminal offences in this country: a jury.

What is "intelligence" and why does it ask to be heard in secret? In particular, what is likely to be the source of intelligence that relates, to refugees from regimes known to practice torture as their interrogative method of choice? Defence lawyers who represent members of Muslim refugee communities in this country know, on the basis of almost daily reports, that the security services have been pressing for information through methods likely to produce unreliable testimony – offering regularised immigration status as the carrot, and return to the, countries from which those individuals have fled as the stick.

Exposed to scrutiny, the falsity of informant evidence can be exploded. But secure in the knowledge that neither the identity nor the content of the information will ever be known to the accused or to the public, not only the informant but the accuser remains safe in the security of secrecy. As far as the regimes are concerned from which those refugees have fled, we know with sickening certainty, that there is now two-way traffic between our intelligence services and theirs to exchange "intelligence".

While our government publicly sheds crocodile tears for the British detainees in Guantanamo Bay, it has emerged only recently that British intelligence agents have been there, and in Afghanistan's Bagram airbase, interrogating those detainees. This country has been wholly complicit in obtaining the product of sustained interrogation in the absence of any safeguards of due process. Then, very deliberately, it has been putting it to use in our own secret hearings. So far these have been confined to foreign nationals, and have stirred scarcely a breath of protest. Now the home secretary says he wishes to extend secret hearings to all those accused of the mere suspicion of terrorism, even though short of evidence that could be proved beyond reasonable doubt in, a public trial before a jury.

We should not be deceived. What is happening in Guantanamo; what is happening in the secret hearings with foreign nationals already taking place in this country; and what is proposed for the future, is in the nature of an ongoing experiment. This is the pooling of access to internationally condemned methods of investigation. Since their utilisation will be covert, the overt experiment is into how willing the, public of this country and those concerned in the passage of legislation, are to allow basic safeguards to be jettisoned without protest. The lack of protest over the imprisonment of innocent men and women in 1974 is a badge of shame for this country. The confidence with which this home secretary can express so unchecked an appetite for further powers that violate every international minimum norm is in itself a further badge of shame that hardly needs legislation to compound it. For this time, unlike those convicted in 1974, the men and women detained or convicted now will never have the possibility of knowing, let alone undoing, the false testimony that has buried them alive.

* Gareth Peirce is a solicitor representing detainees under the Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act 2001.